Watching Boogie Grow

Lilypie Kids Birthday tickers

Quickly Growing into Mommie's Shoes

Lilypie Third Birthday tickers

The baby princess..

Lilypie First Birthday tickers

Monday, February 28, 2011

Its Electric Boogie, Boogie, Boogie....

So this weekends big project for the attic rebuild was to have a new larger breaker box put into the house.  Jon has a friend that is an electrician and he was going to come over and help us out. I mean this is Jon and large amounts of electricity and well that is not a safe thing usually.  Jon is a bit accident prone and we have been to the emergency room for things like 3rd degree burns and almost sawed off fingers.  With that track record having an electrician come over to do this project  was a definite must.  The only thing is that the electrician never showed up and Jon decided he could do it all on his own. *Sigh*

So it was off to the big HD we went to get our supplies and then home to hopefully no burn the house down or electrocute ourselves.

The first thing to be done was to cut out a hole for the new electrical panel.  Most of these things live in a closet somewhere but since this is an old house there is no such panel which means it lives in the middle of my hallway.  You will obviously notice that the new box, is considerably larger then the old box.  Ce la vie....


 You will likely notice that the hole has grown just a bit, but not unreasonably since Jon had to chase wires.  I could live with this cut and Jon lured me even further into his thinking by promising me a new outlet on that wall. The old one was put in in 1950 when the house was built and pulled out of the wall every time you unplugged something.
 The other tantalizing promise that he made was that he would relocate these wires inside the wall rather then through the back of the girls closet.  Well he did get closer, now they at least enter the wall through the baseboard and not the middle of the closet.
 Then things started to take a turn for the worse.  You will notice that the new box is in place, but Jon forgot to feed a wire through the side into a breaker and sooooo the wall had to be opened again.  I was assured that this would be a very easy and seamless fix....Oh brother....

 Then there was the hammer incident...while pulling off the baseboard to put up the new drywall the hammer slipped and took a chunk out of the wall.  Jon decided the "easiest" thing to go was to just replace the drywall on the whole wall.  *Sigh*
 Another view of the carnage that was suppose to be an easy installation.  Notice that my telephone nook is missing, it came back.  I made Jon promise me that he would put it back, its one of the little charming things that I LOVE about our house.
 Here is the new outlet that was suppose to help me get over all the carnage that became my hallway.  It was really not quiet enough, but I have other ideas for Jon in the future that will make me feel a bit better about all of this.
 At least nothing blew up and nothing caught fire and no one was electrocuted.  The power came back on and everything works so at least the prime objective was accomplished.
 The girls and I ran to get groceries and when we came home, Jon  had put up the dry wall and got it mudded in, so at least the hallway was starting to look sort of normal.  It will stay like this until we are ready to do all our painting as we will have to remove the attic steps here and replace the drywall in the ceiling as well as reposition the light.  Seems like the best idea is to do all of that at once.
So for now my hallway looks like this with its giant electrical box in the middle and cute little telephone nook back in its proper place. The spackle is unfinished and needs to be touched up but by the time this project is nearing an end this hallway will look spectacular. 

My only issue is what to hang over that electrical box?

1 comment:

Tamara Ann said...

You have to love my brother and his handiwork!! Look at it this way, at least he is awesome enough to know how to fix it in the end...even if it did require a few extra steps!