I moved the WiFi router (and related boxes) up close to the ceiling.
Routers typically have to live near the phone-line jack, so ours had been sitting on the phone stand. I wanted the room to feel less cluttered.
After moving everything up to the ceiling, the room looks better and the floor is easier to clean. Big quality-of-life improvement.
Probably mandatory for minimalists, but worth doing even if you’re not.
— On signal strength —
The router is on the 1st floor and we use WiFi for work on the 2nd floor, so I was a little worried about coverage. In my case there was no problem. (We’re in a wood-frame 2-story house.)
Actually, signal-wise the better placement is near the center of the house, since router signals radiate roughly spherically.
Before & After
Before
I don’t have a great photo, but the layout was like this — the modular phone jack was here, so the router and phone all lived on the phone stand.
After
Moved up near the ceiling like this.
I was worried about WiFi signal strength, but in our case it was fine.
The space where the phone stand had been is dramatically cleaner now (more on the phone itself below).
Front view:
How It’s Built
Router shelf — structure and wall mount
Simple structure: two boards glued in an L-shape.
Where strength isn’t critical, glue is great because it’s quick — I’ve been using glue more often in DIY lately.
Then I screwed the L-shape to the wall using L-brackets.
Note on screwing into walls
For wall-mounting, find and screw into the studs.
Early in my DIY days I didn’t know this — I’d be screwing into drywall and thinking, “walls don’t seem to hold screws very well…”
I now use a stud finder, like the one below.
For this install, the left side of the wall didn’t have a stud, so I added a wooden mounting strip to the wall first, then attached the shelf to that strip.
Paint
I wanted this to be as visually quiet as possible, so I painted the shelf the same white as the wall.
Water-based white paint — I use this often for indoor DIY.
(In the diagram above I drew it as wooden brown for visibility, but the actual install was painted white before mounting.)
What About the Phone?
“OK, you can move the router, but doesn’t the phone still have to sit on a phone stand?”
That’s what I assumed too — but switching to a “cordless-only” phone setup solved it.
The base unit is just a small comms box (no handset on it), so it doesn’t need a phone stand.
The base unit went up on the ceiling shelf alongside the router.
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