Tag: electrical

The Little Things

August 5, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Sometimes the things that make a place seem crappy or nice are very small. Once the living room was painted I replaced the electrical outlets with nice new ones. The old outlets were just one more manifestation of the wealth of wrong that permeates the house like some fetid disease.

Every time we plugged in a fan, a delicate balancing act ensued where you tried to gingerly step away and not have the plug simply fall out of the outlet. “Why not simply spread or narrow the prongs on the plug, so it holds?” I hear you thinking. I mean, I’m paraphrasing, but that’s the first thing most people do when confronted with a plug that won’t stay in. Suffice it to say that indeed occurred to me as well and despite all manner of bending, it simply hung out of the outlet as though the plug felt dirty for being put into such disgusting places, and was merely trying to escape.

Old outlet

The outlet had been painted at some point or three, it was connected with fabric-wrapped corroded copper wire, and of course the polarity was backwards. After removing the old, broken thing, it disintegrated like a vampire exposed to sunlight.

Properly wired

The new outlet, one of the Decora-style Levitons I’m a fan of, literally makes the entire room feel newer. Now, the fans gleefully remain plugged in to its slick, tamper-resistant, hot-and-neutral-correctly-wired, properly grounded new outlet.

New outlet

It’s the smallest thing imaginable. Five minutes to install, less than three dollars for both the outlet and the vinyl, crack-proof cover, and yet such an amazing effect.

Kitchen Outlet

July 15, 2011 / / 2 Comments

Scary Electrical

Let me start by saying that the electrical situation in the house is, in a word, scary. We have two 100-amp service lines coming in with separate breakers for the first and second floor units. This seems fairly normal. However, the basement was finished into an illegal apartment. When they did this, or maybe just in the course of doing all of the other terrible things, they spliced into the main for the upstairs unit before the breaker, added some wires, and wrapped it up (poorly) with electrical tape, like some sort of gift that is also a fire hazard. Of course nothing is labelled, and strung together, taped, patched, and generally awful wiring pervades the house. We have the old fabric-wrapped wire, lengths of live wire less than a couple of feet long spliced in at each end in the laundry room, draped over water pipes.

The house is a hundred and fifteen years old. When it was built, electricity was still something for expositions and rich people, which is why the house still has gas light fixtures here and there and a place where the wood stove used to sit. It was eventually electrified, of course, though it was done –shall we say– “sparingly”. There are two outlets in the kitchen, and just one in every other room upstairs, except for the tiny front bedroom which has none at all.

Unfortunately, the two outlets in the kitchen are positioned as far as possible from where the cabinet and counters were and will be again. There’s no outlet for the stove, no electric for a dishwasher or range hood, and no outlet for the kitchen counter, where we might want, say, a toaster. We’re not even sure where we’ll plug in the microwave, and we’re slightly concerned that when we do find a place, making popcorn will burn the house down.

All of this brings us to one of the myriad projects underway in the kitchen: adding an outlet. As luck would have it, there’s an outlet on the opposite side of the wall in the bathroom. We replaced the existing outlet with a GFCI (because, duh, it’s a bathroom). We need to get some spacers so that it will sit flush with the tile in the bathroom because at the moment it’s sunk three-eights of an inch into the wall.

Bathroom outlet

The challenge was that the opposite side of the wall in the kitchen is tiled, and cutting through the tile proved to be more difficult than expected. For starters, I didn’t own a Dremel. I tried using a drill, a jigsaw, and a trim router, but without the right bit, blade, or bit the results were less than stellar. I managed to grind off all the teeth on the jigsaw bit, but eventually I got a decent outlet-sized hole in the wall. Not long after, Sarah’s dad returned from Home Depot with a Dremel.

Cutting the tile

The Dremel quickly straightened out the hole and made it usable. We got the wire connected to the GFCI in the bathroom and ran it out of the wall in the kitchen. For the time being that’s as far as we’ve gotten, because we need to patch in a line for the range hood and the dishwasher. We’re not sure yet if the dishwasher will fit next to the stove or if we need to put it on the wall to the left. That will determine where we need to run the wire.

Kitchen outlet hole

We also tried to put an outlet behind the stove, but the tile there is different and proved quite resilient to my efforts. I decided that we can just plug the stove into the counter outlet. It isn’t permanent, after all, and it doesn’t need to be perfect. As usual, what seemed like a small project took much longer than expected and the result –aside from the new hole in the wall with a wire sticking out of it– was an impressive mess of tools in the kitchen.

Kitchen mess

If nothing else, you can see the new peel-and-stick tile Sarah and Meg put down, as well as the no-longer-crazy plumbing that Sarah’s dad helped me straighten out.

 

Slow, Varied Progress

July 7, 2011 / / 6 Comments

Leveling the Toilet

I’ve been trying to finish a project so that I can write about it, but so far things have been going slowly and with several projects in flight at once, we’re not getting any one thing completely finished. Another challenge is that we’ve wound up having to do a lot of things that weren’t in the original plan. I knew the toilet wasn’t attached in the upstairs bathroom, but hooking it up has turned into an extensive bathroom project. Once it’s done I’ll cover it in a post, but for now enjoy the picture of the level toilet and the not-level floor.

During the toilet escapade I wound up having to re-mount the bathroom pedestal sink to the wall and redo the drain. That’s finally complete, but it took much longer than anticipated because I didn’t have the right parts or tools and as always it took multiple trips to the store to resolve it. The good news is that’s at least finished. We have a working and not leaking sink upstairs, which helps quite a bit.

Bathroom in progress

We’ve been re-tiling the floor in the upstairs kitchen, which Sarah will be posting about once it’s done. We’ve been fumigating and baiting the roaches with limited success (they are incredibly resilient, as you know), but are probably going to bring in an exterminator. The drop ceiling and track lighting in the back bedroom upstairs is down, another round of garbage bins have been emptied and re-filled in a day, though the backlog is starting to diminish.

Removing the lighting in the bedroom was interesting. They’d added a light switch in the wall, but it was just wired into the receptacle, which is also where several outlets were wired in. After we used the tester to get the circuit turned off I disconnected and re-wired it. The results as usual aren’t pretty but they’re a substantial improvement over what was there.

Ceiling receptacle

We now need to strip the cracked paint, clean the walls, bevel the top of the drywall that they put over the plaster with joint compound so that it blends in somewhat, tape everything off, and eventually paint. Then we can install carpeting and a ceiling fan and the room will be ready. Since this is just one room, and one of the simpler ones at that, I’m not feeling optimistic about moving in by the end of the month.