Well it happened about 2 weeks ago but I finally crawled up into the attic to finish the electrical for the new room/hallway. It wasn’t completely uneventful as I sliced my finger pretty good and the lights didn’t work the first time flipped the switch. I learned valuable lesson is both incidents.
When I was almost at the end of the cut the knife slipped and sliced across my pink on my left hand. It started bleeding right away. I quickly yet calmly made my way out of the attic while sucking on my finger.
Lesson learned – keep those fingers clear when cutting.
The second was learned while trying to get all of the outlets and switch setup. Basically I had 3 outlets and 1 switch that was getting power from a line I dropped from the attic. This wire came down to the first outlet and then fed power to another outlet and the switch.
To get all of these connections spliced together I first tried to get a wire nut around 3 of them and then go to the outlet. I thought that this worked fine until I flipped the circuit breaker on and flipped the switch for the lights – nothing happened. I then tied the the outlets and the same thing – nothing.
After wiping the sweat from my brow that was there hoping that the house wasn’t going to burst into flames at any moment I killed the circuit breaker and opened the first outlet that had the splice. I pulled it out and saw that the wire nut was not connected and that there where bare wires just sitting there. That explains the lack of power.
The reason that this happened was two fold. First the wire nut just could not handle that many wires crammed into such a small space. Second I had cut all the wires coming out of the wall too short.
This also caused problems for me while I tried to fix it by sticking 2 sets of wires into the back of th outlet instead of using the screws on the side. After about 2 minutes I had the outlet screwed back in and the lights and other outlets working.
Lessons learned – don’t try to get more the 2 wires in a wire nut and don’t cut the wires coming out of the wall too short.
I have to say that I was more pleased with this part of the project then any of the other parts. The reason for this is that I had never done electrical work before. My brother-in-law who is an electrical contractor has always done it for me. He is now 1500 miles away so I had to do it myself.
The other thing that we got done was the shelf portion in the hallway. I bought and cut the “window sill” wood and then added the trim underneath. I have to say that it look pretty snazzy. I haven’t filled in the little areas where the screws and nails are holding it in because I still have all of the other trim to do.
Again, I am lagging on the pictures but I will try to get some over the long weekend and post them.
Have a good Thanksgiving!
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