Spanish Town is one of the oldest residential neighborhoods in Baton Rouge — dense blocks of shotgun houses, bungalows, and Creole cottages, most of them built between 1900 and 1940. The homes have character. They also have construction techniques that make any kind of retrofit work significantly harder than a modern build.
1 · The house and the challenge
The client: a couple who'd restored a 1920s bungalow over four years. 1,800 square feet, two bedrooms, a converted sleeping porch, original hardwood floors throughout, and original plaster walls — the real kind, horsehair-reinforced three-coat plaster over wood lathe, not the thin skim coat that passes for plaster in renovations.
Their requirement was non-negotiable: zero visible hardware. No surface-run cables. No routers sitting on furniture. No white plastic equipment visible anywhere in the house. They'd spent four years making the house look like 1926. They were not interested in looking like 2026.
2 · Why old construction is hard
Plaster walls are a different material universe from drywall. Drywall is gypsum board — you drill it, cut it, patch it. Plaster is a three-layer system: wood lathe, scratch coat, brown coat, finish coat. Drill it wrong and you get cracking that radiates out from the hole. Cut it wrong and you get chunks. Fish a wire through it without knowing the joist bay layout and you hit a fire block every 18 inches.
The other problem: no attic access above the second floor. The roofline came down close to the top of the exterior walls, leaving a crawl space too tight for a person. Cable runs had to go through the walls themselves, not around them through an accessible attic.
Fishing wire through a plaster wall requires a flexible fiberglass fish tape, a magnet stud finder (metal lathe reads differently than wood), and patience. In this house, what should have been a 20-minute run took 90 minutes on the first wall because of a mid-century-era fire block that wasn't on any original plan.
3 · What we actually did
Three UniFi U6 Lite access points, each mounted inside a closet ceiling. The access points are ceiling-mount by design — they sit flush against a round cut, about the diameter of a drink coaster. In a closet, they're invisible: door closed, you'd never know they're there. Door open, you see a small white disc on the ceiling, which most people don't look at.
Ethernet runs: each AP fed from a central network closet in the hallway, cables fished through walls using a combination of fish tape, a camera snake for locating, and a right-angle drill bit for going through the top plates. Every hole was patched with plaster compound matched to the original finish. The client's plasterer husband touched up the patches himself — his call, and he did excellent work.
The network closet: a small panel in the hallway coat closet. PoE switch, patch panel, the ISP modem. Everything labeled, nothing visible from outside the closet.
4 · The result
Coverage: full signal in every room, including the converted sleeping porch at the far end of the house. Speed at the farthest AP: 820 Mbps down from a 1 Gbps Cox service — essentially full speed at range, which is what a wired backhaul delivers.
Visibility: none. The homeowners' guests have asked about the WiFi at dinner parties and been surprised to hear there are three access points in the house. Nobody has found them without being shown.
Total cost: $380 hardware (three UniFi U6 Lite APs + PoE switch + patch panel), $2,100 labor (two and a half days including the tricky plaster walls). Higher than a standard install, but the right answer for the house.