After tearing out all the walls, our first act was to start rewiring the Master Bathroom. As we mentioned before, the line running to the bathroom GFCI first went to some lights. Not only that, the circuit also ran most of the upstairs lights after the GFCI. All very much not up to code. In addition to the GFCI issue, when the previous owners took out the baseboard heaters, they just left the wires in the walls. Luckily these were not live, but they needed to go. Finally we noticed multiple other code violations when deconstructing the bathroom: outlet boxes buried in the attic, wire joins outside of outlet boxes, wires run through joists without nail plates, etc.
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| This scared us till we realized the line was dead. |
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| This is in an inaccessible part of the attic...Outlet boxes do no good here. |
Matt ended up having to run new wires all the way down to the panel box in the basement. When the wires to the upstairs were run by the original builders, they had come up through a wall and been bent under a notched joist. We tied a string to some of the old heater wires we were pulling out, but the string couldn't pull the wire through the necessary bends and ended up breaking. Matt ended up just cutting a hole in the subfloor at the point the wires came up. We also tore out one of the closet walls in the music room to get to the wire runs. That was such a fun experience...
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| This is the tiny gap we had to feed wires up through, after they went through a small hole. |
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| New wires run correctly! |
While adding the two new lines to the electrical panel, Matt continued his tradition of trying to kill himself. First when adding the new line, Matt's pinky brushed something connected to the incoming line. Even though the main breaker was off, that part was still live and he got a bit of a shock. In addition, he got the two line reversed and ended up arcing a line when he went to test what should have been a dead wire. Oops!
In addition to just fixing the code issues, we needed to add some more lighting for the new shower stall and we needed to move the existing vent to a more central location. We ended up finding a new vent at Lowes that matched our new color scheme scarily close and changed out the ugly white model we currently had. For the shower, we ended up putting in two can lights, we were hoping to put in a flush mount light, but the price was a lot more prohibitive than we thought. Looks like Matt is cutting more holes in tile!
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| Surprisingly, there was an outside line for the vent installed. No more holes in the roof! |
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| The new can lights installed |
While the power was off, we decided to also repair the light in the basement entryway.
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| The ballast on this light went bad, nothing but replacing the unit can fix that. |
It had been out ever since we bought the house and Danielle had found an LED on sale when we were looking at the can lights for the bathroom. After ordering a part so that it would mount to the drop ceiling, it installed just fine. Now Danielle can see when she goes down to the basement to do laundry!
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| Our new light |
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| It puts out a surprising amount of light for a little thing. |
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