Electric: Done-diddely-un

I was able to finish up the wiring today in the bathroom, and took care of a few other issues in the proposed laundry room at the same time. It wasn’t too bad, but it did require a few wonderful trips under the house to crawl around in the dirt and cat poop (I think I’m feeding those cats too much). It also required 3 more trips to the hardware store. I think that makes 8 in all.

I still haven’t found a 3-inch roof vent for the bathroom fan, but I’ve decided to wait on that until after the plumbing’s done anyway. When I talked to my neighbor Gary a few days ago about the rough-in plumbing, I mentioned that I was almost finished with the wiring. He mentioned that plumbing should be done before wiring. I’m not sure if this is just a plumber’s point of view or if that’s the way it’s normally done. I can see that if you had a lot of wires in the way it might make it more difficult to run pipes for water and drains. We’ll see if it’s an issue.

When I rewired the whole house a few years back it was about as major a rewire as you can do. The house had a total of 4 outlets in the walls. The main panel was from 1951 and all of the ceiling fixtures were still using the 1895 wiring which fed from a “panel” in the attic. I replaced EVERYTHING from the utility poll on down.

When I got to the butler’s pantry and scullery I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do with these areas. I made the decision at the time that the scullery was going to be the downstairs bathroom, and that’s what I’m doing now. I went ahead and wired that room with it’s own dedicated 20-amp circuit.

The butler’s pantry was another story. As far as butler’s pantries go, this is kind of a large one. I knew I wanted a laundry room in part of it, but I couldn’t really make a decision at the time, so I wired it as a normal room. That means an electrical outlet every 6-feet along the walls. Now fast forward 2 years and I partitioned the room for a smaller butler’s pantry and a laundry room. When I did this, not only did I orphan two outlets in the “laundry room” but when I removed the beadboard they were left hanging in the air.

To make a long story short, since the lights for the bathroom are tied in to the circuit that runs the outlets in the butler’s pantry, I went ahead and got rid of those extra outlets that ended up in the some-day-to-be laundry room. When I do the laundry room I will give it a dedicated 20-amp GFCI circuit.