CH: Day 161
See the moldy soffit? This is not part of the Violation Notice but nonetheless upset my delicate sensibilities. The mold was caused by a lack of gutters which I had installed a few years back.
Better! But WTF is going on with the wire? It proved…yikes…live. I traced it. It went over to the north (right) and then vanished into the house. Upstairs, tucked low in a closet, I found it, but it vanished into another wall. Geez. Going back into the bedroom I found an outlet and realized that was where the power was coming from. Before I could do anything I had to turn off the breaker for the room. But, while the basement and first-floor have now been fully rewired, the second-floor is still a mess and I could not find a breaker marked: NORTH SECOND FLOOR BEDROOM. So I turned off all the breakers. Problem solved.
Mold and crazy wire be gone. The Carriage House is just a tiny bit less brutalized and this makes Ross happy. Yes, I still have once piece of vinyl to install. I also think I will put some primer on the eave, lower left.
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Coming from that outlet outside to power that light? Yikes. Yes, if you’ve had the ground floor rewired and the circuit breakers are correctly marked, time to do the same with the second floor and the basement if that hasn’t been done already. Especially if you are going to rent. Don’t want a tenant getting electrocuted.
I have had the same experience. I was moving a box in the kitchen ceiling over to move a light fixture out of the way of cabinet doors and over the stove where the light was needed. I shut off all of the breakers that were supposed to go to the kitchen, plus the attic so I had to work with a worklight. I touched a wire with a screwdriver and it was live! Turns out the refrigerator was on a circuit with the hallway and that was part of the junction box. I ended up turning off all of the breakers for the entire house but got it done and didn’t electrocute myself.
Had another close call in the garage. The electrician was supposed to rewire the garage breaker box so it was powered by the main box on the garage instead of coming from the house. I wanted to remove the wire going over the patio from the attic across to the garage. I almost took a pair of bolt cutters to cut that wire and then decided to call the electrician first to make sure as I didn’t see the second wire going to the breakers. Turned out he didn’t do the work and I could have electrocuted myself. And I told him so so he would know how careless he was.
Such are the dangers of old houses. Wiring is run all sorts of wonky and you can’t trust the circuit breakers. Even now I’m sure I have some miss-marked. I don’t mess with gas and I hate electrical but I don’t mind doing plumbing. I’m perfectly fine with drywall, tile and painting.
Wiring in any house can be a nightmare. All the wiring that’s original to our house (which was built in 1955) was done to code, and done well and done right. But we had a nutty guy living in our house who was the worst sort of do-it-yourselfer — the kind of guy who wires “new” outlets with extension cord. He’s the guy who finished our basement. For the first 10 years we lived in our house, every time we needed to update something down there, I’d call my electrician. He’d come over, look at what I was seeing, sigh, and fix it. So far, we’ve been lucky — there’s been nothing really dangerous, but there was a whole lot of stupid.
Such a simple solution (switch off all breakers) to the runaway electrical wire.
So… that tingly feeling is not a ghost but live wire?