Probably should
make one thing clear here, as long as it's just the one room
and the garage, I plan on simply running one cable and connecting a hub in
the house to a hub in the garage.
It's fallen a bit out of fashion in the past few years, but 10Base2
(50-ohm RG58 Coax) is particularly useful for the "home runs" between
twisted-pair hubs. Many twisted-pair hubs come with Coax connectors for
just this purpose.
That is exactly what I do between the office and house. Between buildings is a
little over 300 feet so by the time it goes to the hubs at each end it is easily
400+ feet. From what I recall that is a little over what the 10BaseT spec was.
Considering you have your systems clustered and some are at 100BaseT I would not
even consider using the old phone wire between the hubs. I agree it is a PITA
to pull wire - I had a 4 inch conduit for over a year between the house and the
office before I got around to pulling the thinwire through.
Dan