With my compadre gone, I finished up the wiring project. (Finished for now, that is.) I went to the basement to put in a new circuit on the panel box, only to discover after much irritation that there are a couple of types of circuit breaker these days, that are internally indistinguishable, but have a design incompatability to force you to buy from the manufacturer. (The slot where the breaker connects to the power inside the box is shaped slightly differently.) With a new breaker (cost me 54¢ more than the standard one), it worked fine.

Then I went running around the house checking switches and outlets. All was good, we didn't wire any outlets backwards, but there was one room that didn't work. A quick check of the relavant brand-new junction box in the attic revealed that someone had screwed up the wire splices inside the box, and by "someone" I am refering to a person that I see every morning when I shave. In my defense, I had to work on that box while standing over the attic access ladder, so I was in significant peril of my life, and whenever I dropped something I went 18 feet down before bouncing somewhere.

With that junction resolved, all the wiring worked, but I still had to get the ceiling of the upstairs common room to work.

Wiring that light/overhead fan was a pain, as it was mounted onto the joist, instead of into a ceiling box. In the other rooms we installed the boxes, but I was running out of steam, plus this ceiling wasn't suspended like the others. And the fan had a mounting bracket that held the wire splices nicely.

The fan gave me trouble, as I had to install it three times to get it to hang level and not have the blade hub rub the decorative housing. I had actually given up after try two and was putting it back together with instructions to my Mom to not turn on the fan until I'd had another chance to work on it. But third tries are a charm, I guess.

And contrary to the post title, it's not quite done, as we're out of wire to connect one last outlet. Plus we'd disconnected a light on Circuit 13 from it's light switch, because we erroneously suspected it of misdeeds. So I need to reconnect it, but I'd like to put the joint inside a box, because the previous homeowner had just put electical tape over the splices and dropped the wires into the insulation. That's Not A Good Thing, for the record.

Posted by: Boviate at 10:43 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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