A Shocking Start

While work progresses on the outside of the house, we continue to plod along inside with various projects.  The latest efforts have been toward finishing the electrical in the kitchen.  As with so many things in life, in order to complete one thing you have have back waaaaaay up and do 3 other things first.  The end goal is the of course have a kitchen, but a sooner goal is to have all 4/5 walls of my kitchen drywalled.  (Remember, my room is an oddly shaped dining room/kitchen combination of 4 walls and in one place 5.) 

The original kitchen in this place was a tiny, little hot mess with a wall oven, push button cooktop, pendant sink light, fridge and not much else.  Think about all of the electrical needs in today's typical kitchen, dishwasher, under/above cabinet lighting, recessed ceiling lighting, fridge, island, wall oven, range, etc.  Anyone else seeing an issue here?  Yeah, not nearly enough power in the kitchen.  It was at that point I realized that I had to pick which appliances I wanted.  Wonderful, something else to do before doing the thing I wanted to do.  You see, without knowing which appliances I want, it's almost impossible to know where to spec the electrical and once the drywall in is, it would be a HUGE pain, not to mention mess to change it.

While you might think that it would be a blast picking a kitchen full of appliances, it's hard when you've already made yourself a promise.  From the very beginning of this house project, I've promised myself that I would never settle for less than what I wanted, really wanted, instead I would just do without.  (hmm, so far I'm doing good.  Hence the reason I've been living with studs for 2 years.)  All in all, it's been easy to keep this promise to myself.  I live alone and function okay without certain things, like a stove.  Grits, my favorite work breakfast and chicken are easy to make on my hot plate.  Just think about how much easier it will be to make them when I have this installed.

Oh a girl can dream!!  Top it off with a super ventilation system and this girl would be in heaven.

Not to worry you, I haven't left reality.  Here is a more current kitchen pic.

Notice the hours of work?

Each little caption is equivalent to hours of work in a relatively clean attic, several feet of expensive wire (ouch,) new switches and only a couple of drops of blood.  What's the most depressing part of it all?  Once the drywall is up, no one will ever know the hours of work involved.  Instead, a switch will flip and a light will come on or something will move and no one will think twice, so I'm calling a moment for you to appreciate all this hardwork.

Even though there are hours of hardwork behind us, and now a well appreciated electrical plan has been laid into place, a large piece is still missing.  Remember my sentence from above?  (It's okay, I know there were a tons of sentences from above, so I'll help you out.)  Think about all of the electrical needs in today's typical kitchen, dishwasher, under/above cabinet lighting, recessed ceiling lighting, fridge, island, wall oven, range, etc.  Do you see it?  No?

that little word,

such a simple word,

island...

Remember my floor??

No?

I'll remind you next time...

Electrical Shock

I would just like to take this time to make a little musing about electricity.  When someone mentions electrical shock, everyone almost always thinks of the spasm of muscles when your body completes an electrical current.  Me?  I think of the sticker shock of having to replace this mess:

After several deep breathing exercises, lots of prayer, tears and a slight miracle, I have a new box!  The first electrician recommended by my local fabulous GC never called me back after looking at the box.  In fact, he avoided my calls.  Come on, seriously?  Man up and just tell me that I need to find someone else!  Anyway, thanks to my other fabulous GC, my BIL Fermin, I located another electrician.  Within 4 days, George had my entire house re-wired with a brand new up to code box.  Now, I know my new box doesn't rank high on your list of priorities, but since it's my blog, I'm going to force you to look at a couple pics.  (See, there are benefits to writing a blog!)

The previous box was located inside the hot water heater closet.  Now, instead of being inside, it's outside on the side wall of the house.  (Yes, I'm getting a padlock for the bottom.)  Thanks to new much safer building codes, the box only place inside the house where the box could be located was on the wall in my guestroom/playroom.  Hmm, access to massive electrical power in a room where small children frequent?  No thanks!  Now you know why I opted for the outside version.  Here is the former local of the box.

This hole is going to take some massive patching, but as long as I can close the closet door, and (man, can I!) it's waaaay down on the list!  The junction box is my hot water heater power and the blue line is the Ethernet cable for my all too important internet access!

Now, before we leave each other, just one more look!

Why Does Uh-Oh Spell Cha-Ching??

Recall the recent picture of my new pantry?  

You may have wisely noticed that it appeared pretty dark inside of the pantry.  We noticed, so off I went to Lowe's with a gift card from my birthday.  Soon I was the owner of a set of six can lights.  (Nope, haven't lost what's left of my mind, but it was cheaper to buy 6 in a contractor's box and split their use.  The other four are going in my hallway, while two will reside in my pantry.)

So, I, yes me, so proud of myself, carefully cut the two holes in the ceiling in preparation for installing the lights.  Then we headed to the breaker box to check out where to hook the new lights on. 

That's where the issues began.  My box is a Federal Pacific box that when first glanced at appears fine and full of breakers, no room for more.  

That was headache number one, but there was a chance that we could switch out some of the smaller breakers for larger ones, at least that's what I think was going to happen. (Disclaimer:  I am being watched by someone who is VERY adept at electricity and has previously wired entire apartment buildings, homes, offices and other buildings, so you don't need to panic that I'm going to burn myself down.)  Back to the search for replacement breakers.  No luck at the local big box stores, so I googled Federal Pacific Breaker Box to buy them online and up popped this:

 

Yikes!  This is most definitely not good.  After doing a little more research, it seems that the breakers fail to stop the flow of electricity when flipped to the off position.  This is not bueno.   

The problem is so large that the company had massive recalls and banks have been known to turn down homes because they have Federal Pacific breaker boxes.  (I am blessed that no one looked that closely...)  Federal Pacific Electric Company is now out of business and while you can find old breakers that have been tested, I'm not impressed.  So, off to my GC I went in a panic.  (I love my logic here, like somehow I can't sleep because now I know about exact same breaker box that was in my house last night when I slept fine, but it was still my logic.)

My sweet GC, Jack, gave me the name of a local electrician that I am having a bid run with.  It's going to be interesting to say the least.  My exterior box, nope, no clue exactly what I'm talking about, has 140 amps running thought it now, which would be fine except for the fact that it's a 100 amp box.  Technically 180, but odds are good that I won't run the furnace and the a/c at the exact same time.  The line from the box goes up the inside wall and over a stud in the top, which has been known to cause local fires.  GREAT...  As my electrician tells me each of these little facts, I doubt to scare me, we were having a conversation about remodeling and the perils, I see the dollar sides adding up and up.  

Thankfully I have a tax return this year because I'm pretty certain it has been spent in full!