Subject says it all! I finished the wiring up today, installed the fan control, and replaced an outlet while I was at it. All my extra wiring turned out to be worth the effort — there’s absolutely no way I would have gotten the fan control in the wall box with all the extra wires there. It’s enough of a challenge just getting these controls in the box with only one wire. Which brings me to my obligatory gripe of the day. These fan controls (Lutron Skylark model) are great. They seem well-made and reliable. But I hate installing them. They’re so deep that they barely fit in a standard-depth wall box. And on top of that, they have pigtails, and you have to fit three wirenuts (four if you’re attaching the ground) in the box, in addition to the control. This makes them very bad for retrofit work, particularly in older houses where the boxes tend to be smaller. If there’s more than one cable going into your wall box, you can pretty much forget it. It’d be much nicer if these controls could be backwired (stick wire in hole, tighten screw), to eliminate the need for wirenut splices. Maybe Lutron will eventually figure this out. Unfortunately it’ll be too late to help me out.
Anyhow, the only thing left now is to remount the fan and clean up all the plaster chunks, insulation and other crap that fell out of the hole in the ceiling. I’d say we can pretty much stick a fork in this project.