Walmart "Walnut" furniture is veneer but solid walnut furniture is available. You'll pay for it, but Walnut furniture is about the same price as Cherry or QS White Oak (~25% more than Red Oak).
A lot of the stuff sold with appliances is as bad as contact paper. Some high-end appliances are made so the plywood used for the surrounding cabinets can be added.
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Joerg,
My brother Bruce's comments:
-------------------------- I'm not a regular here, but Frank, er Frnak asked me to comment. I am by no means a wireless Wizard, and he may have made our setup sound more exotic than it is. ("Cheap" and "Easy" are more relevant qualities.) We just wanted our home network to work reliably so we could Do Stuff.
1) Frank may have overstated the size, but it's true that our house is rather long, so a single WAP won't reach everywhere.2) The Cable(Modem+Router) comes in at one end (extremum) of the house.
3) The house grew by accretion over 150 years, so there's a hodgepodge of construction styles (old plaster/lath, drywall, open-beam) with crawlspace/attic in some places and not others.4) In case you haven't worked with it: "old plaster" == "if you ever mess with it you'll never get it right again".
In short, I (nor Spouse) wasn't looking forward to running new wires the length of the house, but it seemed like the only answer. Also, pretty much all computing here happens on laptops, so our only interest was in Wireless.
I first tried using one WAP as a wireless bridge midway between the router and a second "actual" WAP. This was supposed to work but didn't. (The diagnostics on these boxes are of course boolean: Works/Doesn't.)
The solution was Power Line Ethernet, in effect a point-to-point link between the Modem/Router at one end of the house and a WAP at the other. The Router doubles as a WAP, so between the two of them there's coverage everywhere. The link goes through 3 electrical panels (I think I mentioned "accretion" (:-))) so I guess we just hit it lucky with the phases. We haven't noticed any particular trouble with noise from appliances. Handoff between the WAPs appears smooth.
Our PLE nodes are (COTS) from Netgear, and the router and WAP from Linksys -- total < $200 at Wal-Mart (most people probably already have part/all of the set). And there's no magic here -- I expect competitors' equipment would do just as well. We did this some years ago when consumer PLE was relatively new, so presumably the boxes are cheaper/better now.
Yes, PLE is multi-drop, so if we ever wanted to add a wired connection ("PC tether"), I suppose we could do it at the cost (price:
Thanks Bruce, and Frank. It's nice that you followed up on the thread here, it can help a lot of others. Our router now works "somewhat". I finished one more room and that now has a lot less metal-frame furniture in there. This has improved things a bit but not 100%. Less multipath is the reason for the improvement, I guess.
Oh, I painfully remember. Germany has what they call "Fachwerkhaus". Lots of old plaster in there. On clay wall blocks that reside in massive wood members, kind of "caged in". And all this will slightly move during storms ...
Yeah, diagnostics are the pits. Every year industry dumbs those down some more. The topper is our HDTV set. You see a picture or you get a blue screen with a "no signal" message, that's it.
I'll check into that. We have X-10 here in the house and that signal has a really hard time propagating even though it's low bandwidth and the controller blasts over 5Vrms into the mains wiring. So chance are it might not work.
Sure does.
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