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!

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 - turn off the power first! Always. I have had a really bad habit throughout my adult life of thinking I can work with live wires. Actually, now that I think about it, like all psychological problems, it started in childhood. When I was maybe 7 or 8, I cut through a the (still plugged in) wire of a lamp that I wanted to rewire for a fort in our basement. The steak knife I was using looked like someone had taken a bite out of it. And a week later, I tried to “repair” it with a little toggle switch I found over at my grandfather’s. Unfortunately, I didn’t know that the wires weren’t supposed to touch! Needless to say, my mom was pissed (and scared) both times. Anyway, back to the present…while I’m very careful at first, it’s way too easy to get distracted and forget that it’s live. And when you’re working in a tight box with 3 and 4 way switches, it’s pretty likely that you’ll get lost in thought as you visualize the circuits and try to figure out which of the two wires you forgot to label is the right one. The end of the story is pretty predictable…Chloe got to see some “fireworks,” as one of the hot wires fused itself to the grounded part of a switch. And I should be embarrassed to say that I did this twice! When you’re working upstairs, the circuit breaker box seems so far away, although that’s a pretty poor excuse. Apparently I fried the switch, because it would work in only one position after that. After replacing it this morning (with the power off), I have renewed my vows to never do this again.

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 the bottom for the outlets. We’ve already established that I’m a little obsessive-compulsive about wiring, so junction boxes give me the freedom to defer the “tough decisions,” such as how many circuits do I want? The ridiculous part is that I can always predict the answer up front…as many as possible, of course. Having lived in too many old houses with poor wiring, I have a personal goal of NEVER tripping a breaker. Barring an AFCI breaker that seemed overly sensitive to our TV (it would often trip a few seconds after we turned the TV off), I’ve succeeded in that goal. So, in a situation where most people would run one or two circuits for a couple of kids’ bedrooms, I have run 5, and that’s not counting the smoke detector circuit. Each bedroom gets its own circuit, as does the main room and the bathroom. The lights are also on their own, as they should be. Nothing is more annoying than being in the dark when a breaker trips. The one concession I made was that I did keep myself talked down to 15A circuits this time, instead of 20A (except the bathroom). Now whether that was due to my realization that I would be unlikely to ever run a table saw or air compressor in a finished bedroom or the fact that copper wiring prices tripled between the time I did our downstairs or upstairs is a secret that will go with me to my grave.

Anyway, enough philosophizing. Working a short day, I was able to run my 5 lines down to the basement and tie them into the breaker box and my handy boxes. Nothing is connected yet, but once switches are installed, we’ll have lights! Of course, finishing the wiring is going to take me forever, because I came to the sad realization this weekend that I have to install 24! outlets, 15 switches, 9 sconces, 4 closet lights and 5 each of TV, network and phone jacks. They seem so easy when you’re installing boxes, then later feel like torture when you’re installing all the components. The most ridulous part is that there’s no way we’re going to let Chloe (or the baby) have their own TV, so my “future-proofing” was a little overkill. And who puts outlets in closets? I don’t even remember doing that…someone must have sneaked upstairs and done it while I was at work!

I also wanted to put in a “plug” for my favorite must-have invention, the little splice connectors made by Ideal. You can pick these up at Home Depot, and they are about 1,000x nicer to use than the colored wire nuts that have been around since the Middle Ages. If you haven’t seen these before, take a look at the picture. They are mechanical splices contained in little plastic packages. After stripping the end of a wire, you just plug it into the connector. There is a mechanism inside that locks the wire in, and it won’t come out no matter how hard you pull on it. To add another wire to the splice, just plug it in. They come in a variety of sizes, from 2 holes to 5, and if you need more, you can simply connect two together. You can finally stop suppressing all those memories you have of taking apart a 4 wire splice to add a 5th and then not be able to get them all locked in by the wire nut. Another big plus is that if you have done your wiring in sections (i.e. half of a room on a single feeder), you can plug the sections in as you complete them, since you never have to expose a live connection with these things. If you’ve done it the old fashioned way, these things are a joy to work with.

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.

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

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.