I drilled through another top plate yesterday. Every time I drill through framing, there’s always this nagging worry that I’m drilling through the last bit of wood that’s keeping the house standing, and this hole is going to be the one that makes the whole house come crashing down into a big pile of rubble. So far, I’ve been lucky. But I still have to drill the bottom plate.. so I’m not out of the woods yet.

The good news is, I think I’ve found a cordless drill I’m happy with — the 12 volt DeWalt. I’ve never been a huge fan of the higher-voltage drills because they’re just too heavy and unwieldy for everyday around-the-house work. My old 9.6 volt drill was nice and light, but it lacked the torque to drive a paddle bit through a double 2×4 top plate. The new 12 volt handled it with flying colors, and it’s almost the same weight. For a weekend warrior like me, it seems to be the perfect balance between power and convenience.

Finally put a wrap on painting Michael’s room last night. Based on prior blog entries, this project droned on for almost a year. Kind of par for the course for projects these days, it seems.

The room has actually been habitable for a month now (Michael slept there for the first time on 9/22… a month ago to the day), but the room has been waiting on one of us to touch up the paint in the corners and around the trim. I finally knocked that off last night. For as bad shape as the walls were in when we started this, I must say the finished product looks pretty nice. At times, I had my doubts about how it was going to turn out.

I learned one valuable lesson from this: when cutting in where two different surfaces meet (i.e. around trim and in corners), skip the blue painter’s tape, use a good quality sash type brush, and just do it freehand. I was amazed at how easy it was, and it didn’t take any longer than it would have with the tape, either. Apparently it’s possible to get better results with the tape than we did, but if it’s just as easy to do it freehand, why bother?

Nothing left to do with the room now except get it carpeted, which we’ll let the pros take care of after we finish painting the master bedroom.

Replaced the outlet at the foot of Andrew’s bed this morning, and it confirms the wiring layout:

1. Master bedroom ceiling fixture  
2. Master bedroom switch box
3. Andrew’s room, outlet at foot of bed
4. Master bedroom, outlet behind bed
5. Back basement, ceiling fixture

This is everything I need to know to come up with a plan to redo the wiring. It will be very similar to what I did in Michael’s room:

1. Disconnect the old wiring between #1 and #2, and replace with a single run of 14/3 which will function as a switch loop.
2. Disconnect the old wiring between #3 and #4.
3. Run a new wire from the ceiling box (#1) to the basement.
4. Mount a new junction box in the basement and splice the new wire into the existing wire between #4 and #5.

An alternative would be to run the new wire directly from #1 to #5, but #5 already has a lot of wires going into it, and I think mounting a new junction box would keep things neater.

The basic idea is to splice the ceiling fixture to the closest fixture downstream of the switch box with accessible wiring, then back-feed the two outlets immediately downstream of the switch.

Anyways, I now know enough about the circuit layout to put it in the wiki.

Incidentally, the old outlet in Andrew’s room was cracked almost in half.  Check it out:

The outlet was most likely original to the house, and it was plastic, not porcelain.  So apparently they were using plastic outlets back then, but not thermoplastic-coated wire.

This evening I did a little preliminary detective work to try to figure out the ceiling fan wiring in the master bedroom, in preparation for redoing it. The goal is to reroute the hot and neutral wiring around the switch box, leaving only a single 14/3 switch loop going to the box. That way the fan control will fit properly in the box. More background is here.

Today I just opened up the switch box, disconnected the spliced hot wire, and observed what went dead.

Dead:

Master bedroom – ceiling fixture / Switch
Master bedroom – outlet behind bed
Andrew’s bedroom – outlet at foot of bed
Andrew’s bedroom – outlet behind crib
Andrew’s bedroom – light in closet next to door
Back of basement – ceiling fixture
Basement bathroom – light and fan

Live:

Master bedroom – outlets on wall adjacent to bed (2)
Andrew’s bedroom – outlet behind dresser
Andrew’s bedroom – ceiling fixture
Andrew’s bedroom – light in closet at head of bed

Like everything else in this house, this raises as many questions as it answers. The next step is to inspect the wiring in the attic (there’s very little visible wiring for this circuit in the basement), and work on replacing some of the outlets. As each outlet is disconnected, I can repeat this evening’s exercise and get more info about how the circuit is laid out. Stay tuned..