232 Green Street

Electrical

Project History:

Now as many of you know, Josh and I (and our friend Shane) have been tackling the old electrical wiring in our house. That has been quite a task. NOTE: To anyone out there who is looking to buy a new house...just because they say the house has been updated to have 220 AMP service doesn't mean they rewired the whole place. In our case they converted a few corners into cubbies and ran wiring so that all floors have at least (2) new outlets. Bah Humbug. How naive of us!

We are taking it to the next level and updating ALL of the wiring in the house. When we first moved in, Shane took on the living room and ran all new wire and installed new outlets. That was easy becasue he full access from the basement. Then we took over the back bedroom which is being redone anyway.

Takin' on the tough stuff:

Now we've encroached on our living space and that has made things even more challenging. This is where the story from last weekend begins...

The first thing we had to do was hook up the fan. We purchased a timer for the fan so that it would shut off after a programmed amout of time. This is another electric saving addition to the house. However, to install it we needed to change the wire to work with the fan. This sounds easy...until you see the hole I needed to fit in to do the work...

I learned a lot about wiring and Josh talked me throught the whole thing.
Here is the finished project.

Now that we had the fan hooked up we moved on to the light over the bath tub. We removed it when we first moved in because it was ugly - and by doing that we also found out that the wiring wasn't safe. So the progress began to replace the light...it became more of a task than expected.







The first time the light was wired, a box wasn't put in the ceiling to hold the wiring. We found out that there was no beam near the center of the tub to put one. Below is a photo journey of how we fixed that problem.


Josh - in Darth Vador gear to protect him from who knows what that was living in the ceiling...

He used a long drill bit to reach through the whole and into the floor boards and carpet above to locate where we needed to cut the carpet.





Next, I cut away the carpet surrounding the hole so that we could gain access to the space below.










This is the section I cut out with the drilled hold in the middle.









This is when Josh got to have fun with the sawsall.
I'm glad the 'rents let us borrow this tool. It has been helpful in many situations like this one.











Once the hole was cut...

And what a beautiful view into the bathtub below.....











Here is Josh getting to install the box.


Here it is nailed into the two joists.











And of course you'd think this is the end of the story...NOPE! When we attempted to fit the light on the ceiling, we found out that the machine screws that came with the light were to short to go through the fixture, and 1/2" depth of plaster and lathe. So Josh and to go our and buy new ones. Of course by the time we figured this out it was 7:30 on Sunday night and no hardware stores are open. I finally got the light up on Tuesday morning before I went to work.

Here is the light fully installed.















Who knew that a simple project could turn so ugly so quickly....