Day 11--The Workshop

Dad and I met at 8:00 this morning.  The crawlspace was still damp, so we focused on working "outside" the house again.  This house has a beautiful workshop attached to the garage, so that is where our focus was today.

And that tiny little room took up our ENTIRE day!!!

It was more of the same.  Find the grey aluminum wire, fish new wire through studs, around bends, through ceilings, down walls, and hope for the best.  Well, we did not get the best.  We ran into PLENTY more staples in the walls again, so we had to cut holes in the drywall.  Also, this room is actually further back than where my attic ends, so I can't even get over the top of it anyway.  It was an interesting day of fishing for wires and cutting into walls.

But it was progressing!

We figured out the power wire started at a junction box behind one of the overhead light fixtures, so that's where we started.  From there, one wire went to the light switch, one wire went down the wall to the first receptacle, and one wire went to the other light fixture.  That receptacle then went to another receptacle which went to a switch which went to an outdoor light.  The other light fixture went down to a receptacle.

The entry point of the power.  Aluminum and two-wire copper.

Needless to say, in this small room, we had a ton of wire to pull and re-wire!!!

I spent most of the day in the attic again.  This room was so tricky due to it being beyond the bottom of my roof.  In the following picture, the end of my roof is the beginning of the downward slant of the ceiling in that room!  So we were blindly feeding wires to each other.  Feeding the wires up to the attic wasn't too bad.  Once again, it was feeding the wires through the walls that was our problem.  The builder stapled the old aluminum wire to the studs, and it's nearly impossible to move.

That grey wire is the culprit.  It's aluminum.  Notice how it goes down beyond the end of my attic!  So hard to get to.

So yet again, we had LOTS of drywall holes in order to feed the wire through.  By this point, we are getting pretty good at mudding and sanding, so it's almost our "go-to" anymore.  "Oh, the wire won't pull?  Ok, let's cut a hole in the wall!"  :)

 

Pulling wires through the studs.  One stud required us making the hole bigger.  What a pain!  Lots of patchwork to do!

As Dad wired, I patched our holes!

Just as quick as the holes were made, I followed behind to patch them up!

No, but seriously, we HAD to make holes in the drywall!  That wire was simply impossible to get to!

More holes!  This time we were having to route it through the slanted ceiling and wall.

All patched up!

A new fixture!  And lots of mud.

As Dad worked on some of the wiring, I installed a faucet in the Master Bathroom sink.  When I bought the house, there was literally no faucet at all.  So I installed the vanity and started to install the faucet.  I had to SCRUB the vanity and tiles first.  There was so much mold and mildew caked in there.  I used plenty of bleach!  The faucet went together fairly well.  I'll have to wait until tomorrow to finish it completely, as the "guts" below the sink is in need of some updates.

I also started to caulk between the floor and the tiles.  There is quite a bit of a gap!

It's taking plenty of caulk to fill these cracks!

The Master Bathroom is coming together!!!

But for the first time since I purchased the home, we were able to use toilets in the house!!!  I can't even begin to tell you how much that means to us!  We have been traveling to the gas station for #2 and peeing in the shower!  Seriously!  It's going to be hard to break that habit, but it was nice to have to walk a short distance to do your duty.

Unfortunately, the water couldn't stay on.  I noticed a teeny tiny leak under the sink in the Main Bathroom.  It's so frustrating!!!  My new 1/4-turn valve is leaking ever so slightly, but a leak is a leak.  I tried re-threading the pipe with new teflon tape, but that didn't do the job.

So for the umpteenth time since I've owned the house, the water is BACK OFF again!!!  It's maddening!

I also pulled off a curious piece of wood in the garage.  A large thin piece of wood had been installed right on top of the drywall, and my suspicion was that someone had rammed their car into the wall.  After removing the wood, my suspicion was confirmed.  So we have even more mudding to do!  That's all right, though...I have plenty of drywall laying around!

Dad headed over to the blue house to work on some electrical work in the early evening as I stayed behind to clean and mud the corners of the fireplace.  I have never done a corner seam before, but I just did what I thought was best!  Lots of mud.  Over at the blue house, we had discovered a four-way switch was bad in that living room a few days ago, but we had no testers to figure it which one exactly.  Armed with the proper tools this evening, Dad had it fixed in no time at all.  He also installed four new tubes in my garage lights over there, and now those are working.  So both houses are starting to take shape!

It's pretty exciting!!!  It wasn't a perfect day, and that workshop certainly had its difficulties, but it's all wired up!  Tomorrow we focus on the garage!!!