Dad's day weekend

This weekend we ran electrical.
A lot.
Of electrical.

Almost everything we will need, forever and ever, amen.

Ever have nightmares about sticking your hands in a dark hole wondering if you'll reach and touch and retrieve treasure or it will just be old petrified mouse poop? I didn't until this weekend.

I also thought, before the weekend, that we needed good lighting in the bathroom because so often you can go in a bathroom and not realize that, even after looking in the mirror, you still have spinach in your teeth, but then you find it out, when a good friend mentions it, and then you realize it was bad lighting in that bathroom--you thought it was just a shadow. Now, after running all the electric, I'm okay with sending me into a bathroom with a flashlight and applying makeup from memory or by touch, and I'll take compliments about my efforts to expand people's definition of beauty to include green plastered teeth on occasion. Appreciating food stuck in people's teeth truly is an underrated, unextolled activity. Am I right?

Frankly, I knew running electrical would not necessarily be fun, but man, it's hard work!

Except for installing the fans and flush-mount lights and the shower light, we ran every bit of electrical we'll need. We ran wire from boxes through ceilings, through ceiling junction boxes or can-light housings. We planned for eventual uses, in case we want to charge our phones in the closet one day. We even labeled absolutely every line coming in and out of a box--hey, we're not master electricians . . . we're BOUND to forget at least one thing later.

Running wire from junction boxes to their intended destination sounds easy, right? Just pull wire through a hole, run it up through some studs, cut a hole in the ceiling, run it through the ceiling, and over to the box, right? I don't think anyone except electricians understand how little we appreciate electricity, especially in remodels, where you don't have access to the spaces you want.

In reality, it's more like this:
Uncoil the wire from the packaging it comes from, which, depending on the gauge of the wire, can be a little like herding cats. You pull it out of a coil, but it wants to re-coil like an old telephone cord. So you do the best you can and straighten and bend and pull and wheeze.

You punch one of those little plastic tabs on the back of a junction box out with the blunt end of some wire cutters, just enough to break one side of the plastic tab loose from its grip on the box, but not enough to break both sides of how its attached. Once you've punched too far, you can't use the box, because now the wires can move around the hole willy-nilly any time they want to (as they're wont to do) because they're not held into the box by the one side of the plastic tab still in place.

So now you use the box, with it's perfectly punched holes, and nail it to a stud. Then you uncoil the super-stiff wire from its packaging and thread it through the hole in the junction box, and start pushing the wire to its ultimate destination, between the studs that you've built, and through the holes that you've drilled for them (and denuded of any many splinters that might cut the wire), and then you bend the wire around a corner, still pulling it throug the junction box, through 10 wooden holes you've drilled. You're also fighting constantly with the rubbery sheathing on the outside of the wire, that both protects the actual wiring inside the sheath, but also adds to the drag co-efficient through each and every hole and bend. This is similar in practice to weaving cooked spaghetti through collander holes to make a basket, except that the spaghetti won't break. And by the way, if you need to run more than two wires that way, you need to drill another hole because three wires in one hole is too much. And did I mention that the temperature of the air that you're doing this in is a few degrees warmer because you're at ceiling height for most of this?

So you've got the wire through most of the holes and around the bends (taking care to avoid all sharp objects like nails and screws along the way) and then you go through the ceiling hole you've drilled before. This is where the super-fun part starts. The hole that you've cut in the sheetrock for the lights has to be cut, so you have to figure out exactly where you want the light, figure out if there is a joist or stud in the way, find a template that will work for your fixture, trace it on the ceiling, and then start cutting the ceiling with a keyhole saw (drywall saw . . . have no idea why it's called a keyhole saw? I'm not cutting holes for keys). You get to breathe in the dust from the cutting, and once the perfect hole you cut drops from the ceiling, you also get the added bonus of wearing about a foot of insulation that falls down behind it. And yes, you can wear masks and safety glasses, which I did, but then you get the added bonus of labored breathing AND not being able to see because your glasses keep getting fogged up. You hope and pray the cut followed the lines you drew, and you breathe (choke) a sigh of relief when the drywall piece is loose and the light fixture fits.

THEN you reach your hand up, blindly, through the insulation (because your arm is smaller than Homewreckers and therefore fits through the hole better) and grope around until you feel the wire hit your hand as it's being fed through another hole in the ceiling I mentioned before. If it was just insulation I was groping around in, it wouldn't be all that bad except for the fiberglass. But the entire time I'm groping, I'm just praying I don't encounter a live animal, or a dead animal, or excrement, or food, or bugs or . . .  Honestly, the fear of the unknown is just as bad as actually hitting something. Luckily, my hands came back to me without incident each time. Phew.

We discovered that lights (and fans) where we wanted them were not in the cards because, of course, a joist is in the way, and of course, even with a shallow pan junction box that can sit on the joist, the screw holes to attach it to the joist still require the shallow pan junction box to sit a bit on the side instead of centered. Of course. But we will have lights in the rooms we want, fairly close to where we wanted them, and the fans will be wherever we can fit them, and anything off center we'll chalk up to: you guessed it, character.

We also figured out that two of the lights we wanted to make recessed cannot be recessed because they're too close to the old roof-line of the house (the space between the roof and the sheetrock just under it is about 4") and so there's no clearance between the light fixture housing and the roof sheathing. So two lights in our bathroom will now be semi-flush mount fixtures instead of recessed cans. Yay. More shopping. I can't wait.

There's more to all of this, but I'll spare you more details. If you're still reading this, congratulations for hanging on so long.

Once we got all the electrical done, we hung sheetrock, which, by comparison, was positively sleep-inducing. We got the inside of the closet hung and the inside of the poo room hung. And then had to stop because it was close to 7:00pm and we were tired. After eating dinner, we were awake about 10 minutes before we both passed out on the couch. And now it's Monday and I'm trying to get the gumption to go mud and tape something.