With the upcoming kitchen replacement I've had to re-evaluate a lot of todos and got a bit of a push to shorten that list.

So, when I bought stuff for the kitchen, I couldn't help also buying stuff for some other long-standing Nice To Have But Not Now projects: "proper" speaker cabling, extra antenna socket, antenna splitter, RCD and new fusebox etc.

One of the tools I got was a cavity rod or fishing rod, a 4m piece of "memory" plastic for threading cables through cavity walls.

First thing I did was put the four annoying speaker wires into the wall/roof. Later, after a lot of crawling on the ceiling joists, pushing and pulling the cavity rod, getting really dirty, and popping a few extra bloody nails from the ceiling, this is the result: a nice junction box. Of course I couldn't help screwing the powerboard onto the table :-)

Naturally I was way too perfectionist and spent ages making things Just Right. Second item on that day's list of improvements was to add an antenna outlet in the bedroom (so that I can receive 4-triple-Z a bit better, not for a stupid TV).

That was a bit more annoying than the first item. Also I had bought one plasterboard brace too few (for mounting the outlets) so I had to improvise something to screw the outlet plate into (the plasterboard itself is a bit too weak for my liking). A piece of trash plastic, a stanley knife and 5 minutes later I had that ready.

Then I managed to pull the rod up too far, and of course I did that in the worst possible situation, too: after belly-crawling into the low part of the roof on the ceiling joists, carefully trying not to exert any pressure on the flimsy ceiling plasterboard and reaching blindly into a cavity I couldn't crawl into at all...

So I had to crawl out, go down, push the rod up once again, go up again and crawl into the friggin spot once more. Eventually I got everything where it should go, except for a few popped nail heads in the bedroom (but that got fixed with the battery drill and a few good screws, just needs me to bring out the plaster filler and the paintbrush once more...)

Looks good, doesn't it?

Next was the !fun to be had with mounting the splitter in the roof. But finding out that neither TV nor radio work anymore was worse. However, I'm pretty stubbo^Wpersistent so I didn't give up: set up the radio and telly to produce some noise, crawled up there (for about the twentieth time that evening...) and ripped the splitter apart. Gotcha: the cheap POS had a cold solder joint on one of the capacitors. Press it down -> reception. I got my trusty gas soldering iron, fixed the spot (I think. Soldering in the dark, cramped conditions with just the head lamp to illuminate things isn't that great) and things started working (so-so. I think I bought the wrong cable quality and may have to redo some of it - at a later stage.)

Naturally, a few days later I had to neatify things some more: spent 4 hours on sorting screws, camping gear and hardware to finally make the tool cabinet look like this: