…is a wonder to behold.
In the story “I am a Lucky Man” I shared the adventure we had with a broken water main. In it I related how Carrie, not wanting to be working with water and metal pipes in a crawlspace with bare wires, decided not to re-pipe the house until the dangerous electrical wiring had been replaced.
The motto “Power Tools are a Girl’s Best Friend” on Carrie’s favorite sweatshirt certainly has been true as she has undertaken the job of rewiring the house. The wiring is a nasty mix of 1920’s vintage “tube and knob” wiring, which in spite of its age is quite serviceable, and some 60’s era Romex that was spliced in somewhat randomly and in scarily amateurish fashion. “Tube and knob” gets is descriptive name from the insulating ceramic tubes used to line the holes in the studs and blocking through which the wires pass, and the ceramic knobs that hold the wires in place inside the walls but at a safe distance from the surrounding wood.
The tubes are too small to accommodate new wire. Besides, the knobs hold the old wire so securely it is often impossible to pull it out. So the first power tool is the common battery powered drill with the uncommon 51” flexible drill bit to drill new holes through which to feed new wire to the outlet and switch boxes. The bit’s 51” length allows you to drill up or down, into or out of, a wall cavity and through any studs or blocking in between. The bit’s flexibility allows you to feed the bit into the hole cut for an outlet box and up or down to attic or crawlspace. It also enables you to drill down from the edges of the attic where the cramped space near the roof’s edge would make it impossible to get the right angle on a non-flexible drill bit. The bit came with a wire sheath that attaches to the end of the bit and holds the wire so it can be pulled back through the newly-drilled hole.
The next power tool is the angle grinder. The old metal outlet and switch boxes need to be removed. It is too hard to reuse these old boxes. You can’t get the old wires out due to the knobs holding them in place inside the walls. Even if you could, the box would be in the way of feeding the new wire through the wall. Even if you could do that, there are no wire clamps to secure the new wire into the old box. Removing the boxes by pulling out the nails that attach them to the studs puts the 85 year-old lathe and plaster walls at risk. Carrie discovered a technique by which you plunge an angle grinder into the wall along all four sides of the box to be removed. The angle grinder cuts off the “ears” of the box through which the nails are pounded, so it can be pulled safely out of the wall. The grinder does cut the plaster, but in a controlled fashion that is easy to patch and that eliminates the possibility of cracking out a big chunk of plaster.
The metal boxes are replaced with “old work” plastic boxes that fit into the opening left by the old boxes. These nifty bright blue boxes can be secured with screws to the studs, or you can use the little “wings” on the corners of the boxes that can be tightened with a screw to grip the wall.
As usual Carrie has done the heavy lifting on this project; climbing through the attic and crawling through the crawlspace, drilling holes and stringing wire, removing old boxes and installing new ones.
She has been frustrated by the weather more than once. Just as she would have a circuit ready to be connected to the circuit breaker box, it would start to rain. Standing in the rain and attaching wires to circuit breakers do not mix.
But step by step, the project is getting done and one extension cord at a time is eliminated. We’ll give you another update once the inspection is complete.
