Remodeling Your Home? Run Cat6 While the Walls Are Open

You stand in the kitchen, phone in hand, watching the spinner turn. The kid is upstairs trying to do homework. Your spouse is on a video call in the back bedroom and the audio keeps cutting out. The router is doing its best. The drywall is doing the rest, and the drywall is winning.

If you are deep into a remodel right now, or planning one for spring, this is the moment to fix the actual problem. Not with a bigger router. Not with another mesh node tucked behind the couch. With wire. Specifically, Cat6 ethernet pulled through the open framing while your contractor still has the walls cracked.

Most homeowners in Pueblo and Colorado Springs do not think about this until the drywall is back up and the painters have left. By then it costs three times as much to fix.

Why your Wi-Fi feels broken

Older homes around the Front Range were not built for the way we use the internet now. Lath and plaster, double drywall, brick veneer, that solid steel staircase by the entry. Every one of those is a wall your Wi-Fi has to fight through. A typical 2,200 square foot bungalow on the Eastside or in Old Colorado City can easily have four or five interior walls between your router and the kid's room.

A router does not care how good it looks on the box. Once the signal hits enough wood and copper plumbing, you get the spinner. Streaming buffers. Video calls drop. Smart locks miss commands. The Ring camera at the back fence is offline again.

The real fix is not more Wi-Fi. The real fix is wire to the spots that matter, and then small access points that broadcast Wi-Fi from where you actually need it.

The window only opens once

Here is the thing about renovations. While the studs are exposed, an electrician or a low voltage installer like us can pull a network cable from your basement utility room to any spot in the house in about twenty minutes per drop. After the drywall goes up, that same drop turns into a half day project with a fish tape, a hole saw, and a patch you can usually still see two coats of paint later.

We pulled six drops in a 1950s house off Pueblo Boulevard last fall while the kitchen was being gutted. Total time: under three hours. The same job after closeup would have run a full day, plus drywall and paint touchup.

If your contractor is opening a wall for any reason, that is your shot. Take it.

What smart home wiring actually means

You do not need to wire up a sci fi house. For most homeowners in Pueblo or Colorado Springs, a sensible package looks like this.

• One Cat6 cable to each TV location.
• One Cat6 to the spot you actually use as a desk or home office.
• One or two Cat6 cables run to the ceiling, ideally near a hallway, where a small Wi-Fi access point can sit flush and cover most of the house.
• One Cat6 to wherever your video doorbell, exterior camera, or garage opener lives.
• All of them ending at one spot in the basement, garage, or a closet, where your modem and a small switch live.

That is it. No racks. No blinking server. A panel about the size of a microwave that lives out of sight and just works.

If you ever decide to add cameras, a Sonos system, smart shades, an EV charger that talks to your utility, or just a kid's gaming PC that needs reliable speed, every one of those is plug and play because the wire is already there.

How many drops, and where

A common mistake is running one cable to a room and calling it done. Run two. The cost of the second cable is the cable itself, maybe twelve dollars. The cost of going back later is the whole job again.

Bedrooms with a TV: two drops behind the TV. Home office: two drops at the desk. Living room: two behind the TV, plus one in the ceiling for an access point. Master closet or hallway: one in the ceiling for a second access point if the house is over 1,800 square feet or has a tricky layout. Outside: one to the front porch for the doorbell or camera, one to the garage.

In a 2,500 square foot home, you are looking at roughly ten to fourteen drops. That is a half day for a low voltage installer working alongside your electrician. It is not a big job. It is just a job that has to happen at the right time.

A note on permits

In the city of Pueblo, low voltage cabling generally does not require an electrical permit on its own if you are not touching line voltage. The Southern Colorado Building Department can confirm what your specific project needs. In Colorado Springs, Pikes Peak Regional Building handles permits. If your remodel already has an electrical permit pulled, the inspector will not blink at structured cabling alongside the rough in.

We have done jobs in El Paso County and Pueblo County both. The rule of thumb is straightforward. If your contractor is permitted, our work piggybacks on that visit. If you are doing a one room change without a permit, low voltage is its own quiet thing. Either way, ask your contractor or call us and we will tell you exactly what you are looking at for your address.

What it costs to skip this

A typical Wi-Fi service call when the network is fighting bad walls runs about $149. We come out, we test signal, we fix what we can with the gear you already have. That is our Wi-Fi Fix visit and most homes feel noticeably better afterward.

But there is a ceiling. If your house has structural reasons your Wi-Fi struggles, no amount of router tuning fixes it. The honest answer is wire. And if you missed the window during your remodel, that wire now means cutting walls.

We had a customer in Belmont who did a full kitchen and master bath in 2024. Beautiful job. They called us in 2026 because the new master bath, with a heated floor, an iPad mounted in the wall, and a smart mirror, had no signal. We had to fish two cables through finished walls, patch, and the homeowner ended up paying for paint touchup. The total was more than what the wiring would have cost during the remodel by a factor of about four.

If your remodel is already done

It is not the end of the world. We can still help. Sometimes the answer is a wired access point in the right ceiling spot using existing pathways. Sometimes it is a powerline adapter or a mesh node placed thoughtfully. We will not pretend Wi-Fi is fine if it is not, and we will not sell you wire you do not need.

For homeowners who want it to just work without thinking about it, our Care plans cover ongoing tuning and small fixes. The $39 Care tier handles the basics. The $149 tier covers a household with cameras and smart locks and a few connected devices. The $299 tier is for the homes where the network is doing real work, multiple offices, security, automation that has to be reliable.

The short version

If you have a remodel coming up, even a small one, ask your contractor to leave the wall open for half a day. Call us. We will run the cable, label the drops, and terminate them in your basement or closet. Six months later when you decide you want a camera at the side gate or a smart speaker in the back bedroom, the wire is already there.

The remodel is the moment. Use it.