I hope I can make sense of this so you all understand my dilemma... I have done an addition to my house. I have one phone line into my house that works and we have it spliced to a cat5 cable that goes to my first phone outlet in the wall. The my electrician ran another cable from that location to my next location and then there is a third cable ran from that connection to a final third location. I also have cat5e data cables ran to each outlet to one outlet and they all are home runs to where I am going to have my router installed. I am familiar with punching down the cables for the data connection at each jack but I am not sure how I can daisy-chain the phone lines from one jack to the next. I purchased standard USOC punchdown phone jacks for each outlet. When I connect the existing phone line to the first jack, I get a solid dial tone. The next part is what I am not sure about. How do I connect and where do I connect the next phone line to that jack so that the phone line continues on to the next jack and so on? If I try and punch down the phone line on the same colors to go to the next jack, I do not get a dial tone on the next jack or the first jack. What am I doing wrong? Any suggestions would be highly appreciated. Thanks.

Alright, I seem to have failed at my first post. Trying again. My phones all died the other day, so I am trying to fix them myself. I am almost 100% ignorant on this, but what the heck. I figure it's something outside. I have two boxes out there. The big one is owned by the Telco. The left half of that is customer domain, so I open it up. When I hook lines there directly to the phone, everything works. I go down to a smaller box below it that I guess I own completely. About 2" x 4". It contains 2 plastic blocks. The bottom block has 2 screws, one for the red wires and one for the greens. That block also has a ground strap that is connected to a second block. The second block connects to nothing but the ground strap and wires. Long story short. The phones work great until I connect the ground wire to the ground strap. I am showing about 1.4 vac at 60hz. I am also showing about 3 ohms of resistance between the red wire screw and the ground strap (and 0L from the green wire screw to the strap). I figure either the plastic block doohickey is fried, or I have some kind of short in my household wiring feeding into the phone, or my ground wire is not well and truly grounded, or I am really showing my ignorance now. Anyone know what's up? Thanks!