Jun 17

“Go For It”

House

I awarded myself 10 points and a gold star (and a curry) today for progress.

In the morning I drew pictures and measured stuff and now have a plan for wall 2.

Then I bought a hacksaw and set about pulling wall 2 down, reclaiming the timber. It’s not really a rational thing, to reclaim the timber, since the new wall would only cost about £36 in timber, but it’s more a thing I have about wasting stuff that’s been ripped out of the ground.

Any worries about its being load-bearing quickly disappeared when it turned out that the studding didn’t reach all the way to the ceiling! Inspired by that, I decided I would assemble the new wall2 flat on the floor then move it into position wholesale.

So rather than cutting the wood, I pulled out and sawed through the nails and got most of the wood out intact.

I now had a plan for how walls 2 and 3 would interface, but before wall2 could be completely removed there was the small matter of the ‘lectrics. Having daylight, and my diary saying “go for it on the bathroom”, I powered off the house and set about the electrics. This involved lifting two boards in the loft (thankfully only boards at the edge of the boarded area). There were two plugs and one lightswitch to relocate, and I had to remove the (probably illegal) dimmer from the bathroom.

There was fun to be had drilling big ole holes in stuff to feed the cables through, then much banging and swearing and wrestling to actually thread the cables through them.

Then wall 2 could be (mostly) removed. Here’s the before and after.

before

extreme ventilation

As usual, once I was working I had a great time, singing piano montunos and dreaming about my latest salsa crush. I was promising myself a trip across to manchester tonight to dance with her but… well, read on.

By 6:30 I decided it was time to wrap up. I wanted to leave the electrics safe and useable, so I refitted the switches/sockets to the now rerouted cables (all but the one for wall2, which was just lying around under the floor, to which I nonetheless fitted a socket). While I was there, I thought I might as well fit the bits of wood to wall 3 to hold the boxes… so at 8pm I was all set to power up the house, grab some food and … POP.

A rather theatrical blue spark from the fusebox and an anticlimactic whirr from the refridgerator.

I remembered the golden rule of “don’t start anything after 4pm in case you need to by new bits”.

Investigating upstairs, the live leads had come out of one of the plugs’ terminal and shorted to earth. I just hadn’t fitted that one correctly. Funnily, it was the first one I’d fitted, before I was hurrying. But I remembered it being a bugger to fit. After the short, the live leads were lightly coated with white, and the screws fixing the socket to the box were black, one of them having had its thread melted. I replaced the socket with a junction box for now.

Fortunately B&Q was open till 9 so fusewire was to be got, and I’m all powered up now (except for the bathroom lights, since I wasn’t about to figure out the rat’s nest of wires in the loft after removing the dimmer wire.

lightswitch and socket moved to the new wall

By the time I was curried, it was far too late to go to Manchester no matter how much I deserved a dance with my crush. So looks like a trip to lancs at the weekend on the offchance. Meantime, the big push on the bathroom continues…