Electrical progress

I’ve been spending nearly all of my “free” time working on the wiring. I’ve come to realize the biggest hurdle (for me) with rough electrical: You do all the work on the wiring, yet there’s no outlets to plug into, no lights to switch on, etc. All that stuff has to wait until after drywall! 🙁

Anyway, here’s the progress made by room/area:

– Caira’s bedroom: Done except for termination of network/phone lines.
– Caitlin’s bedroom: Done except for running+termination of network/phone lines.
– New bathroom: Power run for lights and fan, but a fair bit of work remains to be done.
– Laundry/utility room: Done except for network/phone feed. (The patch panel will be in the utility room, so all the comm wiring terminates there.)
– Hallway: Done.
– Nook: Done.
– Kitchen: Main (fluorescent) lighting placed and temporarily wired. (*Lots* left to do!)
– Dining/game room: West wall (switches, outlets) done.
– Living room: No high voltage work, still need to run network/phone lines.
– Great room: West wall (entertainment center) wired, including speaker wires, network/phone wiring. Wall outlets done. Sconce lighting done.
– Front porch: No progress.
– Garage: Ceiling outlets (lights, garage door opener) done. Power run to GFCI outlet, but not terminated.
– Back porch: Coach lights [re-]placed. Still need to wire them and patch the walls where they were originally placed.
– Quilt shop: Floor outlets done. Outlets on west wall. Quite a bit of work remaining, but the shop is lower priority than the house at this point. (It’s a separate permit, so we don’t need to have it done at the same time as the house.)
Attic: Whole-house fan done, FAU done, power (40 A @ 220 V!) run to condenser, attic lights almost finished. Power is run for one attic fan.

The major items on the punch list are (biggest to smallest):

1. Kitchen: Can’t do much until we fur out the original east wall to line up with the new wall, but we’ll lose our remaining kitchen facilities when we do that. Thus it will probably be the last thing we tackle.
1. Quilt shop (low priority)
1. New bathroom: Run power for vanities (2 x 20 A circuits). Determine final layout of vanities, place and wire vanity lights and outlets, wire ceiling lights and exhaust fan.
1. Great room lighting: We’ll need to remove some of the old joists to make room for can lights and ceiling fan mount, then place and wire the new cans.
1. Dining/game room: New outlets and network/phone wiring in three original walls, complete with fire blocks–not fun. Replace original ceiling light box with a ceiling fan mount.
1. Garage: Need to install & wire coach lights flanking roll-up door. Waiting on installation of new personnel door for its light.
1. Front porch: Two can lights over porch, outlets for Christmas lights (with in-use weatherproof box) at peak of gable.
1. Attic: Install both attic fans, run power to second one. Finish attic lighting circuit. Test whole-house fan.

About Jim Vanderveen

I'm a bit of a Renaissance man, with far too many hobbies for my free time! But more important than any hobby is my family. My proudest accomplishment has been raising some great kids! And somehow convincing my wife to put up with me since 1988. ;)
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3 Responses to Electrical progress

  1. Jim says:

    Oops! Forgot the attic wiring. It’s now in the main article.

  2. Jim, take advantage of your walls being open to run any other wiring you might think you’ll need at some points. Like any speaker wire, if you think you might in-wall or in-ceiling speakers, or network cabling.

    Also, if you’re getting inspections that conform to IRC, you may need to use fireproofing caulk to fill the holes drilled in the framing for any vertical penetrations, like running cables from one floor to the other. We learned this the hard way by failing our inspection. It was actually the insulation inspection that checked this, but applied to both electrical and plumbing roughs.

  3. Jim says:

    Thanks for the heads-up! I did indeed run my speaker wires already, along with telephone and network wiring throughout the house. Hopefully I don’t get hammered on the top-plate penetrations like y’all did! I guess it wouldn’t be that big of a deal to shoot caulk into all the holes, but I really don’t want even a 1-day delay at this point.

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