Problem: No telephone jacks in bedrooms.
Our Master bedroom has no telephone jack. I've been making it into our
PANIC room. It has an escape hatch bolted from the inside, it has an
alarm panic button, deadlocks on the door, and ..... no telephone!!!!
Previously we had drilled the family on 'what to do if someone violent
tries to break in'.
They knew which room to run to, lock it, hit the panic switch, and call
security on the telephone. I had put in bright colors, all the
emergency numbers ON the phone AND beside the phone, etc.
The kids drilled for earthquakes, fires, and... yes... invading rascals.
The primary idea is... that if I'm home, and someone tries to get in and
rob us, the kids and wife get safe first while I deal with things. If
I'm not home, the panic room also serves as a good way to stay safe and
call for help for the kids and any babysitters.
Anyway, don't be too shocked, it's just part of life for the kids, and
they've never had to USE the training. I suppose folks back home don't
rehearse 'okay if I say 'PANIC ROOM' what do you do!?'....
I've also taught my kids basic self defense (I put on pads and helmet
and had them practice beating me up).... and they also walk around with
self-defense items/alarms in their pockets.
YES I'm serious about security.
Anyway... they've never HAD to use these things, which is great... but
should they ever, they'll be able.
BACK TO THE POINT
SOLUTION: I was simply going to run telephone wire under the house, and
punch down a jack. BUT, you can't get under this house. I noticed that
the previous owner ran speaker wire all over the house from the office.
I suppose so they could listen to their music. But I use itunes, and
Airplay... so I can do that wirelessly. And since a telephone only
needs Tip and Ring (2 pins/cables) I can easily convert the speaker
cable into telephone cable. Being that I keep around old wires, I
happened to have several telephone cables.. SNip Snip.. splice splice..
tape tape.. bingo, a phone in every room that had that speaker wire.
Panic room... Complete!
Man... there are moments when you're hording cables and dongles in the
hopes that they could one day be useful to someone... and you think 'Why
don't I just throw this stuff away!?' (if you've ever seen an
electronic geek's workbench you know what I mean.
But then there are days like today when you need it, it's there, and you
get the job done. And you think "yeah, it's all worth it"
This is doing nothing for my hording mentality of 'don't throw it away
it might be useful'. I have several bins of broken old stuff that I
pillage to splice together something useful (albeit ugly).
