Project #5, Part 2: not quite complete
We made great progress yesterday, however did not quite finish the electrical work. Dad and Dave arrived around 8 and got to work quickly. Dave did a little repair to the back door that i didn't even realize it needed. He also did some much needed repairs to the basement stairs ... making it much more comfortable to walk up and down throughout the day. We removed a huge pile of trash from the basement and i did a major cobweb removal to make it easier to work up in the ceiling. Meanwhile, Dad and Jim made quick work rewiring the basement lighting including adding several new lights. Combined with the cleaning and stair repair, the basement is hardly recognizable.Next, holes began appearing for some new outlets on the first floor (we added i think 6 more outlets, 5 more than i had even hoped for, very cool). The challenge of getting wire from the basement up to the outlets then began. It appeared the much of the previous power came from somewhere above ... which is really hard do in a retrofit. Come from below, that can't be so hard ... can it? Well, our house has appx. 9"x9" timbers for sills that need to be drilled through to get up into the wall cavity. In one of the first holes, Dave nearly had a fire ... his drill bit got red-hot trying to get through these really tough timbers. A big glass of water down the hole set us more at ease (and the smoke stopped coming out). They devised a new technique and the rest went fairly smoothly (that i know of anyway).
After the downstairs was rolling, Brad Stayte (who was also around helping ... including doing a bang-up job of staple removal from the stairs), Dave, Dad and
I started working upstairs. I worked with Dad to get our wire from the basement up to the attic. Luckily, we found a nice path beside the vent pipe. From there, we all started working at getting wires pulled from the outlets to the attic. I think i inhaled a bit too much of the attic's insulation ... but i guess my lungs will be well-insulated for winter. Speaking of insulation, i was very excited to find some insulation in the exterior walls. It appears to be an older expanding foam insulation. It seems to be cracked in some areas, but is vast improvement over what i thought would be there (nothing). Upstairs, we ran new wire to all the outlets (including 3 new ones) and the bathroom lights (which we are adding a switch for). Meanwhile, Jim had been running a ton of wire for the downstairs outlets and getting the boxes ready.Mid-afternoon it became apparent that we just weren't going to have time to finish. So, we had dinner and took things to good stopping points and called it a day so the northerners could get home. I'd say we're about 75% done with this portion
. Pretty much all the outlets have new wire. Basically, we need to get new wire to the lights and switches plus terminate with outlets/switches/covers. We weren't sure at first if we'd do the lights, but Jim found some questionable wiring at the kitchen lights that he feels should be replaced. The upstairs lights will be pretty easy, but we'll probably need a hole in the ceiling to do the main level lights. Unfortunate, but ultimately it'll be much better to have fresh wiring. It will be really nice knowing that the whole house is on safe wiring ... elminating some scary looking connections of knob-and-tube to modern wiring (a big mess of them above the downstairs shower of all places).All in all, it was a successful day even though we aren't done. We'll find another weekend soon to finish the job. I really enjoyed spending time with my dad and brothers ... not something i get to do much anymore. Despite all the long day of hard dirty work, we still had a lot of fun. I really look forward to doing it again.
posted by Chris and Chrissy Miller @ 9:39 PM
1 Comments:
I am momentarily jealous. The next Big Project on our house involves hiring an electrician to update the wiring and add some lighting. Ah...if only we lived close enough for the Miller team to arrive and fix all our problems for cheap :)
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