DIY telephone wiring to sockets

echristie

Live in old house with spaghetti mess of telephone wiring. Want to rip them all out and start again from brown eircom box by front door. As we are doing building work, it's a great opportunity to put sockets where we want and hide all the cables. Also want to leave extra length of wiring to link later into new extension.
Is this a DIY job and what kit is required?

rogue-entity

All you need is a nice long roll of telephone cable, the round core type with the blue/white orange/white wire pairs inside. You should be able to get that at Any DIY or Building supplier store. And you will need telephone sockets for every area you want to add a new point and you may want a few junction boxes, just to keep things tidy. You can reuse the existing points just fine.

Before you remove the existing wiring, make a note of the wires going from the junction box to the main telephone point, and leave them alone. This way, you will have a guarented service on one telephone, no matter what goes wrong anywhere else.

Just install the points where you want them, and connect the two blue/white wires to the red/green wires on the points (also labled R and G or L1 and L2) and run the cable to a convenient central location and wire it into a junction box. Wire all your other points into this junction box and run a wire, making sure to match the cable colours back to the eircom junction box, connect the blue/white wires to the same contacts that your existing phone cable connects to, on your side.

Stoner

I'd suggest a slightly different way.
I would use Cat 5e or Cat 6 cabling to help furture proof your installation.
I would not link any of the phone sockets, I would pick a central point, maybe the attic, I'd bring one cat5e or cat 6 cable from the eircom brown box to the attic.
then every other phone point would be cabled directly to the attic.
You can use the one junction box here where any cable you wanted would be joined. just pick one colour pair and join them to the same colours on the cable that links to the brown box.
Using this method you can add a new phone/computer points at ease, when your extension comes on line simply have the new cables wired through the new attic straight through to the existing attic to your new central point (assuming you will have a new attic)
this way you could in the future terminate the cables in RJ45 points and pop a patch panel in your attice for a computer network and shared internet access with out all the wireless stuff., note that a standard phone jack will fit into a Computer RJ45 outlet too. (note any where you will need a standard phone and computer will need two cables to operate in standard configuration)
rogue-entity's advice on keeping the existing cabling in place is very good, and his method is also very effective (and the quickest) just giving you an option