Friday, wiring the hallway

I had suggested to Mom that it would be useful to have some outlets in the hallway. There had been one attached to a 3-way switch for the hall lights, but how useful is an outlet that only works when the lights are on? After Mom said it would helpful, I thought about it and realized it would be a long, difficult, and filthy job, rooting around in the attic insulation to run new wires. Plus there is no good power source, since the house wiring is all 50 years old or more.

But I got to the point there was little to use to procrastinate about the wiring, and realizing that was what I was doing, I told myself I couldn't go down to a book store until I finished the wiring. So today, I started it.

By 9:00 AM, I was up in the attic. I laid out the hallway, marking the two walls, and what electrical wires should be in them -- switches, outlets -- anything in the walls. Since there is little in the hallway itself, most of this is in the rooms adjacent to them -- the light switches in the kitchen, and guest bedroom, the outlet for the fridge, the kitchen stove fan vent.

The attic has two layers of insulation. Some years ago, I put down a layer of R-30 batts on top of the pre-existing blown-in insulation. Looks like cellulose, possibly with some rock wool mixed in. I peeled back the R-30 fiber glass and started digging thru the cellulose.

I was able to find the wires for the old 3-way switch outlet, but was off for the other two new outlets. I cut the outlets in the walls in the hallway first, and then tried to drill into the same wall cavity from the attic. I missed on both of the two new outlets, and had to drill another hole in an adjacent wall cavity. It appears that the wires for, for example, wall switches do not go straight up into the attic, but rather sometimes go up over a cavity or so. I can see where the wall studs are from a nail in the top of the wall header. The nails are 16 inches apart, as the wall studs are 16 inches apart too.

Other than having to drill more holes than I wanted, the main difficult was feeding a new wire down the wall an into the existing electrical box next to the 3-way switch for the hallway. This outlet had been wired to the switch, but it clearly needed its own power supply. I was able to push the new wire down in the wall cavity, and catch it with a bent wire, but had great difficulty getting it just the right length to be able to guide it over and into the existing holes in the top of the electrical box. Mom helped, but being hard of hearing, and not too quick, it was difficult to coordinate my raising and lowering the wire in the attic with her telling me if it was at the right level.

Eventually, we trapped the wire and tied a string to it. This let Mom know where the wire was, even when it had been pulled up too far, and we were able to get the wire to be just the

right length so that it was resting on the top of the electrical box and I could edge it over so that it would pop just a little into the hole in the box. Then with a pair of needle nose pliers, I pulled it down into the box, used a wood clamp to keep it from sliding out and went back up in the attic to push more wire down.

Once that wire was done, it was fairly easy to take it over and drop it down the next hole. I overestimated how much wire was needed to get down to the new outlet hole in the wall, and shoved it in. Downstairs, I could put my hand thru the new outlet hole, and grab the wire, pulling it over and out of the wall, crimping it to keep it from sliding back into the wall, and then back upstairs to pull out the excess wire. Then it was the same for the next outlet. Each of these new outlets got two wires -- one to bring it power, and the other to take the power on to the next outlet.

After the last new outlet hole had wire, I needed to figure out where to get power for these three outlets. One option is a box in the attic that is labeled to be a 220 power line going to the Sun Room heater. I could tap off of half of this to get 110. But that seemed wrong.

But I noticed that a line came up from the circuit breaker box directly to the pull-string light in the attic and then off someplace else. So I decided to replace the line from the circuit breaker box (circuit 7) with a new line (so we have real 110 plus a ground wire). I could run the wire from the new outlets into the pull-string light box, and continue to run the rest of the line where ever it goes.

That took more work. I had to identify the wire, disconnect it in the circuit breaker box, and run a new wire from there up thru the wall into the attic and to the pull-string light. But once that was done, I could then attach the line to the new outlets, giving them power. And I managed to do it without electrocuting myself.

Once the circuit breaker work was done and the new outlets were wired in, I could clean up the attic, put all the insulation back in place, and go back to the hallway and attach the wires to the new outlets, put those in the boxes, and put a cover plate over them. This is pretty easy; it just takes time.

Finally, around 7:00 PM, I had the outlets wired and in place. I turned on the circuit breaker for circuit 7 and used the new outlets to power the vacuum cleaner to clean up all the sheet rock dust and cellulose insulation I had tracked all over.

There is a new outlet on the left wall, and then another on the right wall past the doorway into the kitchen. This run of the circuit ends at the outlet on the wall at the end, over the phone player, next to the light switch.