Cliff Hanger

The shelf remodel project continues.

As you will recall, in last week's (two weeks ago?) episode, I had torn out a lot of sheetrock, some 2x4 studs, and the hallway shelves, finishing here:

Here's what's happened in the intervening time:

First I took out more sheetrock...

...exposing some wiring.

If you look in the right corner you'll see some big, thick red and white wires; they are the wiring to the thermostat. (This makes me think that those little-bitty blue and white wires I found a week or so ago are not for the ceiling heat. Hm.) Right next to the red and white wires you can see a big, hefty, black wire. That is important later on in this saga.

In any case, all the demolition in the hallway is done.

Now for the living room:

Look! A "before" picture!

I am going to tear out some of this wall too. So I drew it in, scored it, and then used a drywall saw to make my nice, clean line. And then the crowbar comes into play.

Marked, cut, and the first hole is knocked out.

And there goes the drywall.

After many, many hours, and several large bags of trash, here is what we have:

from the living room side

from the hallway side
The outlet in the middle of everything is slightly problematic.

That was enough for one day. Then I had to do some thinking, and figure out the rewiring of the outlet. After talking to Bruce, and talking to the nice man at the hardware store, I was pretty sure I could move that outlet to a better spot. So, last Saturday, off goes the power and out come the wall studs.

Lindsey is holding the wire which is now dead. And now I have to hurry because we can't turn the power back on until that is safely connected to something. And Kaylie is having a party in four hours. (Unfortunately I didn't finish until after the party started, but it all went OK anyway.)

Ryan helped me to frame in the opening on the living room side. He was a willing helper, which was good, because I can't hammer nails or drive screws in straight to save my life.

And here is the re-routing of the outlet:

on the hallway side
This day I learned all about junction boxes and splicing wire.

There's the outlet, in its new spot.

Here you can see Kaylie's friends playing video games, looking from the hallway side of the world. (I don't seem to have a pic from the living room side, but it's pretty much the same as a few pictures up—aside from the outlet.)

Since Saturday we've had a few people come over to the house for little things, and they are all so impressed with how open the entryway looks now. And it does! It's cool enough to almost tempt me to leave it like this. Well, with drywall and paint...

But that is not the plan. It was never the plan.

Anyway, I'd spent a week of demolition, hauling, and rebuilding, I just kind of sat around all day Monday. I read. I watched movies. I hung out with my kids. Partly because I wanted a break, and partly because I was working out another brain puzzle: What should I do with my wonky light switches?

In the left-hand picture you see the switches on the wall that I see
every time I come in the living room door. In the right-hand picture you see their wiring.

The switch for the entry hall makes sense. That is a light that shines right inside the front door, and gives light to the stairs that lead to the basement.

The outside light switch (on the right) makes marginal sense; since these are the only switches right inside the door, it's pretty much where you'd expect it to be. Sadly, the outside switch is the one that I automatically want to flip to turn on the living room light. Even after more than a year. (The living room light switch is just around the corner from this set of switches. If you really want to, you can probably see it in one of the earlier pictures.)

The middle switch for the kitchen hall light makes no sense whatsoever. The kitchen hall light is about five feet away from the entry hall light, and it has a switch on that end of the world too, so it works both from the kitchen side and from the entry side. This seems unnecessary. In fact, it is unnecessary because I only ever turn it on from the kitchen side.

My big plan is to 1. move the living room light switch around the corner, making it the switch I automatically want to turn on when I come into the house. 2. Move the outside light switch over one space, so it takes the place of the redundant kitchen hall switch. 3. Get rid of the kitchen hall switch that's in the entry, and only have that light wired to the switch that's near the kitchen.

So a couple days ago I shut off the power to those switches (also killing my living room light), and pulled the switches out to see what things looked like in there. I had talked to the nice man at the hardware store, and I was pretty sure I could do this. Then I pulled the kitchen hall light down and had a look in there. I disconnected the wires from the light fixture, connected the ones I thought were right, and then turned on the breaker.

No sparks!

No tripping the breaker!

No light.

I rearranged the wiring and tried it again. Now the light would turn on, but neither of the switches would turn it off. I tried again. And again, and again. For three hours! Up and down the step-ladder, working above my head, going to and from the breaker box. I did trip the breaker a couple of times. I did get light a few times, but couldn't turn it off again with either switch. At this point I was wishing I had taken a picture of the wiring before I took it all apart. At this point I would have been ecstatic just to have all the switches working the way they originally did.

Oh, man! I opened up a big can of worms!

Finally I just splayed all the wires away from each other, walked away, and tried not to kick the cat, who was innocent of all of this, for the rest of the day.

Then I called our good friend Daniel Ray, who is good at this stuff, and he came over that evening. He said he's never seen a light wired this way, but he could probably figure it out. Unfortunately his time was limited; he had a meeting to go to. But at least he got the wires safely put away (even though the kitchen hall light wasn't working) so that we could use the living room light again.

And there we sit. I can't close in the wiring until this is fixed somehow.

What will happen in the next episode? Will Loralee get the kitchen hall light to work again? If she does, will she still try to rewire the switches?

Tune in next time...