New Electrical Panel

New Electrical Panel, a photo by b-a-boop on Flickr.

Yeah, we passed our final electrical inspection today. Here's our new relocated breaker panel. Not quite sure why it needed to be so large, it's less than half full. Now I need a tall narrow work of art to cover it up. Guess I'll have to look through the thousands of my husbands photos for something the right dimensions. I also need to pick out a paint color for this little hallway and paint the patched up wall.

Out with the Old, In with the New

So glad to say good bye to all the old, unsafe fire hazards that were part of the original 1947 wiring in our house, including the ungrounded cloth insulated wire, original meter box that was in the laundry room & that fuse panel mounted behind the kitchen cabinet.

And look at our shiny new weather head outside and some new outlet boxes, switches etc. We even added some new pendant lights at the front entrance.

The Inconveniences of Reconstruction

After two weeks of construction a few inconveniences are starting to get old. Mostly having all our belongings packed up & shifted to the center of every room so that the electrical outlets can be rewired. It makes for annoying flow patterns throughout the house. I already have matching bruises on each hip from bumping furniture corners. And of course as the rewire progresses, we're shifting boxes from one room to another, thus loosing track of where the hell to find things when we decide we need them. And then there's the constant drywall and plaster dust. Even with most things covered in plastic and their sweeping up after almost every hole they make, I still see a constant layer of dust everywhere I look. But hooray hooray, yesterday we passed the rough electrical inspection, so now we can proceed with patching up the holes and moving some things back. Of course, I'm wishing I had time to paint behind some of the larger pieces of furniture so I don't have to move them again later, but I'm needed to finish the floors, walls & cabinets in the kitchen.

Total House Rewire

This is what happens to your walls when you need to rewire your whole house. Since our 1947 home had mostly cloth insulated wire, lots of holes needed to be knocked out to accommodate the new electrical wires & to pull out that old unsafe, ungrounded antique stuff. That old woven covering gets caught up on nails, in tight holes in the studs & any sharp splinters on the old wood studs. Our house luckily has wood floors & joists and a crawl space under it which I hope made the job a bit easier for the contractors doing this messy job. Since we ripped out the kitchen floor to the joists, it gave them better access under the house although it's a tight squeeze with plenty of dirt and the Florida heat is killer. Before they started I was expecting we'd have long runs of wall gouged out between every outlet. But fortunately in our case the wires came down the wall under each outlet and draped under the crawlspace to the next outlet. It seem the electricians had a tougher time when the wires ran up the walls to light switches & into the ceiling, that being another horrible place for them to work since we have blown-in fiberglass insulation up there. These guys have been doing an excellent job keeping the holes to a minimum and cleaning up debris all along the way. I am so pleased with the work they are doing, as I was expecting a much bigger mess.