You use the white and blue wires.

Get portable wireless phones.

There are a couple of different wiring standards for phone.
The red-green (first line) black-yellow (second).

The four pair cables tend to start withe the first part of the 25-pair wiring scheme:

Line1: white-blue and blue-white
Line2 white-orange and orange-white
Line3: white-green and green-white
Line4: white-brown and brown-white

the first being the insulation color background, and the second the stripe color. Some cables skip inverting the white stripe, e.g. white-blue and solid blue make the first pair.

The fifth pair would be slate.
To get more pairs then they substitute red, black, yellow, and violet for the white and repeat the color combinations.

This post was edited by ronnatalie on Sun, Sep 29, 13 at 12:22

It sounds like your wiring does not follow any of the current color conventions, but phone wiring is so simple that you should still be able to figure it out. If the outside wiring terminates in the house with two posts, or two pairs of posts, just start at that point.

Connect the blue-white and white blue wires of the new phone wiring to the existing primary posts, and then connect the other end of the phone wire to the primary red & green posts on the new phone jack.

There will also be a 2nd set of yellow-black posts on the new jack. On the jack end you can connect the orange-white and white-orange wires to those posts just in case you later install a 2nd phone line. Leave them unconnected on the house junction end if there is no 2nd set of posts.

If there are additional wires in the phone wiring you purchased, just fold them back and tape them out of the way. They are not needed for your phone installation.

Plug a standard phone line into the jack and it should now work.
Bruce

Thank you all very much for your answers!

Weedmeister, I will have a portable wireless phone, but with only one decent phone jack inside the house, I need to add more. I'm a mom with limited means....and extremely limited knowledge of wiring! :) The phone jack on the screen porch will be in -30 C winter temps, so I don't think leaving a phone out there would be a good idea. That's why I want to add at least 2 more inside.

Dennisgli, Ronnatalie & Bruce -- Thank you for your clear explanations. But....as for the wires, my new wire is the ordinary standard red/black/yellow/green one. Since I don't have blue/white and orange/white, can I still manage this with what I have? [Also, Bruce, thank you for the info on taping the extra wires out of the way -- I can imagine myself thinking "now what the heck do I do with these extra wires?" --- thanks for the detail!]

Colleen

But....as for the wires, my new wire is the ordinary standard red/black/yellow/green one. Since I don't have blue/white and orange/white, can I still manage this with what I have?

Sorry - that's pretty old for being new wires :-) .

As ronnatalie pointed out you can use green and red.

The old standard for phone wiring was red-green for the first line and yellow-black for the 2nd line. When folks started using 4 wire cable for networks we got blue-white/white-blue for the 1st line and orange-white/white-orange for the 2nd line. The old cable with red-green and yellow-black wire colors is not sold that often anymore.

FYI - The green-white and brown-white pairs in the cable are needed for Category 5 or Cat 6 networking, but not usually connected for phone wiring. You will also notice that network cable uses twisted pairs inside the cable to limit interference while traditional phone wire will usually have straight wires.

Bruce

Good news! I wasn't sure about what was meant by "green and red" (green at one end, red at the other? etc. etc.) but I connected (only) the green and the red wires at the new jack and (only) the green and red wires in the basement and ......wait for it.....IT WORKED!

Thank you! Thank you!
Colleen