electrical

I got the  bug to pick back up where we left off on the downstairs hall closet (abandoned stairwell).  Back in 2007, we started converting the steps into proper shelves, but we’ve done nothing but pile more crap into the closet since then.  Over the last week, I finally brought some power (including a light) and some network cables for our wireless router into the formerly uncivilized space.  I’ve been wanting to move the router to the ground floor for a long time, because it performed pretty poorly in the basement utility room, being blocked by the ductwork and the furnace.

While I was at it, I relocated our phone’s base station here, too, since it suffered from the same problems as the wi-fi.  Both are working much better than they were before.  And if you’re wondering why I did such an overkill, industrial job with the electric conduit, it’s because I scavenged about 200′ of conduit and dozens of handy boxes when my company’s office was being remodeled a few years ago.  The contractor was going to send it all of for scrap, so I grabbed as much of it as I could.  It’s been taking up space in the garage for over 3 years, so I get all excited any chance I get to pull out the conduit bender and actually get to use some of it!

Conduit and cat5, oh my!

Yesterday I cut a couple of holes and fished some wire to get the room ready for our TV.  The holes were a pain, because I didn’t have time to cut the holes before the drywall went on.  This meant I had to cut through both the drywall and the underlying plaster, which is easy to do if you want dust everywhere and much more tedious if you don’t.  My “least dust” method is to gradually score through each layer with a utility knife.  After clearing the hole down to the wood lathe, I use a rotozip to slice out the lathe, which allows me to cut it without doing any damage to the remaining lathe and plaster.

The most challenging part of this project was just figuring out where to install the box behind the TV.  This box, which is a split box to handle both high voltage and low voltage wiring, had to fit between the proverbial rock and hard place.  The mounting bracket, the back of the TV and the stud locations all conspired against each other, so in the end I had to go with the best compromise and will have to just make it work in the end.  I’ve run the 120V wire from the upper box down to the existing 120V outlet (on the right), and the orange low voltage box will eventually be fed coaxial and network cables from the crawlspace.  Instead of running permanent low voltage wires up behind the TV, my plan is just to use the wall cavity as a chase for the wires.  Technology changes so quickly that it’s difficult to imagine what kind of wires we may need down the road.  Since I don’t want to touch this again, my solution is to just drop any wires I need through the upper hole and pull them out through one half of the bottom one.  Nice and low tech. 

High and low voltage boxes

No, I’m not talking about the excessive amount of coffee I may have drank this morning but rather about the fact that we now have working lights and outlets upstairs. It felt like I was on an assembly line by the time I screwed in the last outlet, but everything is all juiced up now. Except for most of the sconces, which I’m leaving until the end. I can easily see myself whacking one with a piece of trim, so it’s safer to wait. It is the most exciting feeling to walk up there and be able to flick a switch or be able to plug something in in any room. For the last 16 months, we’ve had to coordinate a maze of extension cords, all fed from single cord snaked up from the basement. And before that there was no power up there at all, a byproduct of our “let’s just gut the upstairs now, so we can save a bunch of time” decision we made back in 2004. I still have to say that was the right choice, because if we had moved even a single piece of furniture up there, this project would NEVER have gotten started. Yesterday I taught Chloe the most important lesson about working with electricity Click to continue »

Sunday I worked on the wiring upstairs, mostly because Saturday’s experience with the leveling compound scared me off of doing any “real” work. I thought I’d take it easy by trying to get some power upstairs.

Every time I wire (or plumb or do anything for that matter), I’m always adjusting my philosophies. That basically means that I do it the opposite of the way I did it the time before, because “that way sucked.” Anyway, my current mantra on electrical is to use lots of handy boxes to tie things together. So, what you’re looking at here are my two main upstairs boxes, the top for the lighting and Click to continue »

We ran electricity out to the patio and installed our old dining room chandelier. Low wattage flicker bulbs add to the ambience, as do our new Craigslist bargain table and chairs (only $100 for the set – woo hoo!)

I used a conduit bender (for the wiring) for the first time, and the thought it was a lot of fun. Earlier in the year his company remodeled his office, and he was able to salvage tons of old electrical conduit and boxes. That came in handy for all the practice he needed to get it right.

Both low and high voltage wiring has been completed upstairs. I’m a bit of a geek when it comes to wiring (and maybe a few other things), so I went a little overboard on the TV and data cables. We don’t really have any intention of having a TV upstairs, but we all know it’s easier to do it now than it is to do it later. We ran coax for TV and two CAT5 cables to five different jacks spread around upstairs. They all will feed into our media box in the basement and be used to connect TV, phone and data, as necessary.

It was very encouraging to see these things go in.  It makes you feel like there actually is light at the end of the tunnel.

Bathroom wiring completed. Julio is an electrical engineer and has practiced on many project before, so he always feels like the wiring is the easiest part of the job.

One of the areas where we splurged was on the Simpson basement and closet doors. They make a fantastic five-paneled door that is an exact match to our existing doors in the rest of the house. More than just about anything we did, these add to the authentic feel of our remodel.

You can also see that much of the rewiring is done in this picture.

The wiring is much of the way done in this picture. Julio has a tendency to really overdo wiring and run individual circuits for just about everything. On the plus side, though, we’ve never, ever tripped a breaker in this house. You can run a table saw or air compressor in just about any room;)

Notice the black ABS pipe in the lower right side of the picture. That was the washer drain for the previous owner, and you can see the dryer’s gas valve just next to it on the floor.