Ourrrrrch!!!! I'm too old for that stuff. Good news for the day: Just got back from Mayo/JAX and my wife's ulcerative colitis is officially in remission. Thank God!
I got all the upstairs windows seen to. As a bonus I got to cut back a piece of ugly coax cable, although not quite as far as I hoped I did get to a place where I can hopefully trace it and pull it into the attic. For some reason whoever put cable into the house decided not to run the coax cables through internal spaces but instead feed them all over the outside of the house. There's nothing like the look of a black cable pinned to the white flashing under the attic. If they had stopped there it would be one thing but instead they ran around the outside of the house, then into the attic space, along a bit, back outside, along a bit, and so on. It's hideous. We had one cable cut off years ago when we had the new windows in (about the only thing the window fitter did get right), and now I'm fixing up the caulking I'm taking the chance to cut it further and further back. I know roughly where i need to be in the attic to pull it inside, and if I can physically get at the other section of it I can cut it off and pull a whole chunk of it from the attic. Today was another day where the promised rain and storms didn't appear. Next weather guess is rain and storms tomorrow. We'll see. Perhaps I will get to my electrical work, now the upstairs windows are done.
Don't blame you. The question is "How can you tell when a politician is lying?"......Their lips are moving.
Most of the way through what I had hoped would be an easy electrical job. It's not inherently difficult to do the work, it's just a royal PITA because getting from one side of the switch to the other involves going through just about every part of the house. And for good measure I realised the back boxes I had for lights aren't big enough for this situation because I have so many wires in there. I'm not 100% sure even the biggest box I could find technically complies with the latest code but everything fits so I figure it's close enough.
I don't think this box is overly stuffed. It's a domestic remodel so no inspection is required. If code could be a little clearer regarding just how to add everything up it would certainly help It gets really tedious trying to figure out just what counts as a wire - when you've got the rules about counting up the cores, but apparently ground cores count as one and however many wire nuts there are count as one (so if you've got a single wire nut to splice grounds together it counts as one, but if you've got eight wire nuts as I have in this box it still counts as one), and then if you put a switch or similar in the box it counts as one but if it's a light fitting that doesn't poke into the box it's not clear whether you're supposed to count it or not, and so on. For a time I had a box that was too small as far as code was concerned but worked quite neatly. It's gone now because I needed to add another wire that wouldn't physically work, but until then I had two 14/2 cables coming in, with the two neutral cores linked with a wire nut on one side, the grounds linked with a wire nut on the other side, and the live cores feeding the switch in the middle. It fit pretty well, but probably didn't comply with code because the box was only about 8 cubic inches and I had 4 live and neutral cores before counting grounds, nuts, switch etc.
Got my initial piece of electrical work done. The light at the top of the stairs works again, only now it's powered by a nice 14ga cable rather than the nasty knob-and-tube that powered it until this morning. Next up is to fit a central light to our bedroom - the cable from the previous light is in place but I need to do the messy stuff like making a hole in the ceiling to fit it all. Fun stuff right there. Then I'll address the next light along, which is currently a weird hybrid because it's powered by 12ga cable (totally unnecessary since 14ga is perfectly fine), but the 12ga cable is tied into the knob-and-tube circuit with the grounding core just folded back and wrapped around the sheathing. It will be good to get that out. Then I get to move a load of stuff around so I can get at the space over the guest bedroom and get a light in there. Hopefully I can get most of what I need done before the attic gets unbearably hot. Last summer I wanted to do some work in a crawl space behind the attic but the temperature in there was the wrong side of 130 degrees so I decided to leave it...
Yeah, which is why i like the deeper boxes, if there is room, when a switch is involved. Non-protruding light fixture allows for a bit more room. It's a value call, mostly, IMO.
It does seem a little odd to have such detailed calculations, even down to the point of saying you need 2cu.in. for a 14ga core and 2.25cu.in for a 12ga core, but then leaving the idea that all the wire nuts combined count as if they were one core. It's silly to say that adding one extra core, even if it doesn't splice with anything and just connects straight to a terminal inside the box, means the box needs to be 2cu.in bigger but if there's one wire nut in there you can add another half a dozen without needing more space for them. Since it's a domestic remodel some aspects of code simply aren't possible to fully comply with. I've only got 2" deep wall studs so if a box is supposed to be deeper than that, too bad - it won't fit and I'm not knocking holes in my concrete blocks just to fit a slightly bigger back box.
A piece of work in my house was easier than I expected! I knew sooner or later something would run smoothly without endless problems. I wanted to get at the space above our bedroom in the attic so I can add a central light, operated by a switch. As with the other bedrooms in the house, ours has no central lighting so we use table lamps and bedside lamps. It's convenient turning off the light by just reaching out and turning the key on the side of the lamp, but tedious when it comes to going into the room for the first time, where we have to fumble for the bedside lamp in the half-light. I knew where I needed to be, thanks to a long drill bit that let me put a hole in the ceiling narrow enough to be inoffensive and deep enough that I could spot the drill bit from the attic. I figured I have a slightly dropped ceiling under original lath-and-plaster, so decided to break away the lath and plaster from above, then pick up the larger pieces and vacuum up the dust from the back of the ceiling tiles, and only then cut the 4" hole in the tiles to fit the back box for a new light. It turned out the gap between the two wasn't 2-3" as I thought but actually more like 3/4". I'm glad I didn't attack it with my hole saw, or I'd have gone through both layers and ended up having to do an ugly job in the bedroom to make it all look OK. So now I've got easy access to the attic space, I know where to drill my hole, so instead of just fitting a light I'm thinking I'm going to fit a ceiling fan instead. It will be prettier than a light and obviously have the benefit of cooling as we come into the summer. I'll need to take it down before my demolition phase hits our room but that won't be for a while yet. Once I get this in place I can lay boards in the attic over our bedroom and then move all the stored stuff I had to shuffle around to lift the floor. That will be a nice development - more comfort, and a few more bits taken off the nasty original wiring.
Today, dealing with the death of a client/friend/fellow lawyer. Got the call from his wife/widow last night about 9:00 p.m. I'm the Special Designee in his will for wrapping up his law practice. So in addition to the loss of a friend that I talked to every month and had lunch with at least 5 times a year, I now get to step in and "be" his lawfirm. My task will be to work all of his cases through to the end, whatever that means, and then wrap up his lawfirm, sell the assets, and distribute the funds to his estate. I know of one major piece of litigation that he's involved in that has been going on for 5 years, and I expect it will go on for another 5. Wow. Just go hug someone you love today.
There are many days when I wish I'd never started this project. But despite everything, I love this house.
Today's job shouldn't involve any nightmares. I need to take a bunch of boards I bought last summer and screw them to the joists in the attic. I had planned to do it last year but we had friends coming to stay and by the time they left it was cold, so the wiring project got delayed, which in turn delayed laying the boards. Now I've got wires in place and figured out what route the yet-to-be-laid wires are going to take, I can get on with laying the boards over the top. Hopefully I won't delay the project by getting any big splinters stuck into myself.
Slight change of plan yesterday. I ran some cables and put a switch on our bedroom wall. It doesn't do anything yet, the wire it's connected to is left loose in the attic, but it's there ready for when the fan gets put in. And I got some scraps of the original flooring lifted from the attic, ready to put the new boards in place. Today I might take a day of rest, or I might at least make a start on getting the wiring for the fan installed. It means dismantling our bed so I can get at the ceiling above it, so I don't want to start a job I can't finish. I'm seriously contemplating putting most of the wiring into the box while it's in the attic and only then cutting the hole in the ceiling to get it placed accurately.
Brain not fully working today so not ideal conditions for fitting my ceiling fan. But in the end I got it fitted. It took longer than I hoped, partly because I had to dismantle our bed to get at where I needed to be, and partly because I did a couple of stupid things (like forgetting to put a cable clamp in the back box, which meant I had to take the cables out and put them back in again. But the crucial thing is that now we have a working light and ceiling fan in our bedroom, set up just how I wanted it. Now it's time for a drink and a rest and then, since I'm hot and sweaty now, I might as well go back in the attic and get some more boards cut and laid. Since I've got the ceiling fan fitted I can put the fiberglass back and press on with laying boards.
As its Mother's Day, we called our respective mothers, and my wife wanted to go on a walk with the family. So we checked out a park we had not visited yet - surprisingly since it is just outside of town.
The ceiling fan is installed. It took longer than it should have done, largely because I struggled to get my brain in gear and forgot the kind of stupid stuff that meant I had to keep revisiting parts of the job (like when I forgot to put the cable clamp in the back box, which meant I had to feed all the cables back out of the box, fit the clamp, and then put the cables back through the clamp). But it's in and it works. I also got a few boards cut to length, so tomorrow I'm going to run the cable to the next light. From there I can lay more boards and start shifting the stuff from the next room across. Once that's done I can start lifting more of the floor so I can get a ceiling fan into the next room.
Found a truly staggering piece of workmanship in tracing cables. Some knucklehead decided to drill a big hole through the entire depth of a supporting beam, rather than moving a light fixture a couple of inches to the side. It isn't even aligned with anything, but looks like some genius wanted to screw it straight into a joist and so drilled a hole about 1" wide, through the joist and the floor above. Who cares about weakening the beams that support the floor above, if it makes it marginally easier to fish out a cable, right? So now I get to find a honking great piece of wood to strengthen the joist, and some screws or bolts suitable for load-bearing applications, and address what they have done. By comparison fitting the light, a couple of inches across from where it is so I can use a back box rather than just poking a cable down through the ceiling, should be a breeze.
On the house chore lists, got about 90% of the tiling in the shower completed. Just ran out of juice for the final bit, so it will have to wait for later!