I hear you, being on that same road currently seeing the hospital from the inside too many times to my taste the last years. Next friday the results of the MRI scan for prostate cancer.
More fun with ceilings. This time I found two new wires I wasn't expecting to be there. It turned out they didn't lead to anything. One of them was the other end of a wire I found, disconnected at one end and with no sign it carried any current. I even put a tag on it to show I thought it was disconnected. The other end was in the middle of the inner ceiling (the one several inches above a dropped ceiling) ending at what was obviously once a light fitting. So I got that wire pulled out and thrown in the box with all the others. The other wire looks like it might be live. Still just cut off and left there, but live. Awesome stuff. I'll get my linesman's pliers and get that cut off so I can take it out, and then there will be two fewer cables to worry about tracing. The way this is developing I think my external light will be relatively easy to reconfigure. Which is always nice. Now I just need to figure out how a cable that runs end-to-end across the adjacent room gets there.
Listening to a pretty intense storm while lying in bed at 4:30am. Pouring hard, windy, lightning, thunder. Vacation day for me. Glorious.
Trying to figure out just how these wires I found all link together. The old knob and tube wiring doesn't seem to abide by any of the rules of modern day wiring. There are individual wires running all over the place with joins here and there. There seems to be a single live core that powers one porch light (not the one I've been trying to trace - there are two) but I have no idea where the neutral for it comes from. There's a chance it taps into the neutral in the one I have been trying to trace - from here just about anything is possible. Or maybe a single core feeds the switch to control that light, which in turn taps into a neutral somewhere. I'm going to get a piece of paper and draw as much as I've figured out so far. Some of the blanks might have to wait until I've pulled down some more ceiling, but we'll see. Sooner or later this house will give up its secrets.
Just used a milk froth-er and had an awesome cup of coffee. That gadget is so cool-- battery operated
It looks like my wiring cluster is less offensive than I feared. It's certanly done in a way perhaps best described with terms like "interesting" and "creative" but is done in a way that I can work on that one small section alone. It took a little bit of figuring out just how it all hung together but it's giving up its secrets. Now the only question is whether an armored old cable is secured to joists, or routed through joists, within the cavity space of my porch. Assuming it isn't and I can use it to pull a new cable through, it should be easy enough to get that section updated. And although I'd really like to strip all the wiring out and hit it all at once, if I can do it in sections without having to turn off most of the house in the process I can live with that.
Part of my ugly wiring cluster is now gone. The job I hoped would take 30-40 minutes ended up taking three hours, not least because pulling an armored cable between two bricks when it was cemented into place was tricky, to say the last. Eventually I managed it, and pulled a nice new piece of grounded 14-gauge to replace it. Edit: Because of the way the armored cable was routed I had to try and chisel off a section of concrete block, in a confined space, while working on a ladder with my head pressing against the ceiling and my shoulder twisted around a ceiling beam. Then I had to pull and twist the armored cable, while still on the ladder, trying to get as much leverage and force on it as I could but without doing it in a way that if it suddenly gave I'd fall off the ladder. It was interesting, to say the least. Although I have to say I was thankful I didn't end up needing to buy a 12" long masonry bit that was thin enough to fit through the gap and even more thankful I didn't have to try and get my angle grinder into the confined space. Wearing safety goggles to work the chisel isn't much fun when they keep misting up, and wearing safety goggles and a respirator while trying to work almost blind with an angle grinder, while up a ladder and trying not to cut through anything too important would not have been a lot of fun. The inside wiring is still best described as "suboptimal" but at least that's one piece of it removed, along with four ugly cable joins. From here at least I can press ahead and continue to work with the interior cable, without needing to do anything more outside. At least not until I get to the other porch light. That should be a barrel of fun.
More fun pulling down ceilings today. Another 150-odd pounds of rubble pulled down, another growing pile of laths. I'm up to about 500lb of rubble in sacks lined up ready to go to landfill just as soon as there's enough. I also took a look at the wiring I've got with a view to figuring how to cut it all apart so I can rewire the areas I can get at, and leave the other areas still working ready for later work.