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.

We selected copper-foiled Tiffany-style stained glass shades from Rejuvenation for our living room sconces, box beam fixtures and dining room chandelier.

In our kitchen, we used five Arts and Crafts style pendant fixtures from Progress Lighting. (To tie the fixtures together with the rest of the room, we installed matching carmel-swirled glass panels in the cabinets flanking our refrigerator.)

For our ground floor bathroom, we chose sconces and overhead lighting from Schoolhouse Electric

In our front entry hall, we used another stained glass fixture from Rejuvenation which incorporated all of our paint colors from the entry hall, living room and dining room, which really helps tie the ground floor together.

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.

1) Don’t take apart the box beams. When we did this for the living room, we came up with the much better method of drilling all the way up into the joist cavity and just feeding the wires through to the attic spaces upstairs.

2) Don’t permit work like this. This was the first time we ever got a building permit, and we came to regret it. The inspector was unhappy that the wires came through holes in the wood and did not terminate in a box. While I definitely believe that building codes are a good thing, there are times where the letter of the law conflicts with something that would still be safe. Obviously, very little in an old house would meet code, so any remodeling is an exercise in finding the right compromise between codes and aesthetics.

After a lot of effort, we were able to solve the problem by buying the smallest possible “pancake” boxes and painting them to match the beam stain. We were fortunate that the 3 1/2″ size was very close to the diameter of the fixtures bases, so they basically act as spacers between the fixture and the beam. If you didn’t know to look for them, you’d never notice them.

If anyone has ever seen a fixture like this or knows anything about it, we’d be interested in hearing from you. Thanks.