Cleaning Our Antique Light Fixture, Pulling More Wire, and Another Conduit Mystery

Well, much to my disappointment, the antique light fixtures we won on eBay still haven't arrived at our door. Granted, one of them I paid for just last week, but it's been a few weeks since we sent payment for the other. What's that seller's excuse? Grrr. I want to get these installed soon, because my cousin is coming in town in a few weeks and she hasn't seen the place yet. I want to distract her from the disastrous bathroom and the super outdated kitchen with pretty, sparkly lights.

Well, I can't really complain too much. We still have to finish pulling new wire through the conduit before the lights can be installed, anyway. So that's what Ted and I did today. With a little help--as always--from Seamus.

I think I've gotten over my fear of rewiring; I'm no longer hyperventilating and thinking "OMG, I'm working with electricity!" Because really, I'm not. I'm just the Girl Friday, the one that chants "heave, ho!" and feeds the wires into the wall. Ted is the one who knows what he's doing and can hook everything back up again. Of course, I nag him to test and test and test the lines again to make sure they're not live. But that's me; I worry cuz I care. And because he humors me, he tests them again in my presence, even though he's already tested them several times and maps everything he discovers in our "Box House Book."

So, pulling old wires and replacing them with new has become fairly routine. We'll be ready to install the dining room chandelier and the front hall light when and if they ever get here.

And while we're at it, we're replacing all the cloth wiring along that circuit. That includes the wire leading up to the light fixture in the front stairwell, the stairwell that leads to both the front door of our unit and the tenants' door upstairs.

The stairwell is lit by two gorgeous matching light fixtures, one on each level, that are probably original to the house. Seriously, the lights are what really sold me on The Box House. I walked through the door and fell in love, just like that. Here's one of them:

But look closer; some moron in the past painted the ceiling without bothering to either tape up the canopy piece or loosen the screw to drop it enough to paint under it. What a mess. (Click on the picture to enlarge and truly understand my annoyance.)

I was really nervous to try to remove this paint, because I was terrified I'd also remove the gold paint underneath. The lamp is some kind of pot metal with a red, green and gold polychrome paint job. What I finally did was to get a shallow bowl and fill it with an inch of warm, sudsy water--I just used dish soap. Then I let the canopy soak in the water for fifteen minutes or so. This seemed to soften the paint enough that I could remove it with my fingernail. It was tedious, and underneath the splashed on white latex was a layer of slopped over taupe-colored enamel--the dreaded enamel that seems to cover the wood trim in the bedrooms, and is nearly impervious to strippers. Luckily, for once, it didn't seem to adhere to this particular surface. I was able to scrape it off with my fingernail as well. Voila!

I don't think these lights have been taken down in decades; here's what it looked like when I started to wipe away the dust with a damp cloth:
Granted, some of that is sawdust from when we refinished the stairs--that stuff gets everywhere.

I had decided not to take the panels out to clean the glass. Each is held in place by a foldover metal tab, and I did not want to risk bending the old metal in case it snapped. So I used a damp sponge and warm, sudsy water to gently wipe the whole lamp down. To get the moisture out from behind the metal grill work when I was done, I used a can of compressed air to blow it out. All in all, it worked very well. It's possible to see more detail on the surface now, and I'll take another picture when I get the light back in place.

We did encounter another mystery while pulling the wire. We thought it would be a straight shot from the dining room ceiling fixture to the ceiling box in the living room, a distance of maybe 20 feet max. Afterall, there are no other fixtures that it could be powering. However, the wire we pulled out was more than three times that length. So the conduit was not straight, and was traveling off somewhere else, to power what, we're not entirely sure yet.

We first double-checked the remaining wall outlets in the living room, including the one in the floor that powers our old electric fireplace. No luck. None of those wires were connected.

So now, our best guess is that there's another electric box or two hidden behind the plaster. The most likely scenerio, since the conduit seems to be heading in that general direction, is that there were two sconces above the fireplace, in typical bungalow fashion. And just as we found a dip in the plaster where there was once a lightswitch, careful inspection above the fireplace shows a few dips in the plaster that might have been the location of sconces.

Arrgh, I neglected to take another picture of the fireplace to show y'all, and the only one I seem to be able to find on the hard drive is this one from Christmas. It'll have to do. In the space on either side of the mirror there is a suspicious swirl of plaster, no doubt covering up newspaper-stuffed electric boxes.

We need to do some investigation as we did before, possibly some test drilling to find the boxes, but I'm so excited at the thought that we might have discovered another vintage detail buried by a previous owner.

A Bottle of Lubricant, Two Kittens, and Another New Chandelier

We're lucky that the original wiring of our 1920s house was strung through rigid conduit, as that makes the task of stringing new wire through that much easier, and we won't have to pull down plaster walls to do it. And this evening, I had my first lesson in rewiring as I got to help rewire the line that's going to power the ceiling fan in the living room.

I had been dreading having to help Ted with the chore, because it didn't sound like it was going to be much fun. I thought trying to get new wires through the conduit was going to be really, really hard and kind of tedious. In truth, we were done in less than 20 minutes.

The original cloth-covered cord looked to be in decent shape, but still, we chose to upgrade it to new wiring. To do so, Ted attached the new wires to the end of the old wire using duct tape. Then, as he stood on the ladder and pulled on the other end of the old wire, I fed the new bundle into the conduit, straightening the wire as I went along.

Here's a view of the wires before I started feeding them in:

To ease them along, I smoothed on a light coating of Wire Pulling Lubricant. Until this month, I didn't even know there was such a thing.

In addition to the new wires, I also fed a strand of Poly Line through. This will be left in place in case we need to add another wire through the conduit at a later date. That way, we will just be able to tie the new wire to the end of the Poly Line and pull it through without disturbing the wires that are already in place.

The kittens, as always, supervised the process. We've taken to referring to them as "Kitten Fridays," because they're so helpful. (Not.) Here they're playing with the old cloth wire. Please don't enlarge the picture, as you'll only see how badly I need to vacuum the rug.

In other electrical news, we bought another new (to us) light fixture, an original polychromed 1910s chandelier that will go in the front entryway to replace the gawd-awful one that's currently there. Ted spent the last two days negotiating a price with an eBay vendor that we think is fair, saving us 35% on what he was originally asking.

Here's the new fixture:

Here's a view looking straight up at the polychrome finish:

It's BEAUTIFUL. I can't wait until it gets here. This is the light it's replacing; I've never bothered to dust it, because like some of the other fixtures, I never meant for it to remain in place for long. Besides, I'm too short to reach it without a ladder. Sheesh, between the rug and the dusty lamp, you're going to think I'm a terrible housekeeper. And yikes, is that a cobweb in the corner?

At present, there is no light switch for this fixture, it's controlled with a pull cord (and one that looks suspiciously like a shoelace). Ted will be adding a push-button dimmer switch to control it; because it's centrally located, we thought a dimmable (is that a word?) fixture could double as a nightlight.

While he works on that, I'll be stripping the wood trim on the five doors that branch off from the entryway. Here's what I'll be dealing with:

Go ahead, feel free to enlarge that picture. Seriously, how does varnish get to look that bad? It seems to come off easily enough with Soy Gel Remover. After I get this cleaned, sanded, and refinished, Mom and I will finish off the walls with Behr's Venetian Plaster. I love this stuff, and used it all over the condo (the one we're currently renting out).

And then, we'll be able to open up our front door without squirming in discomfort that someone will see the shabby wood trim.

Fairy Door -- A Door for, Um, The Fairies

Here's our front door:

But wait, what's that in the lower-left corner?

Mom found this Fairy Door, made by Enchanted Fairy Doors, on eBay. Fairy Doors seem to be all the rage, now. You can place them on the interior or exterior of your house to give your house fairies, sprites, and guardian creatures their own entryway. The door will only open for them, of course.

Mom looked at quite a few before settling on this one. Most were too whimsical and cottage like, suitable for someone from Lord of the Rings, but not a hip urban-dwelling fairy. This style better matched the brick facade of The Box House.

I've loved fairies, fairy tales, and myths since I was a kid. One of my earliest--and favorite--memories of my father is from when I was six years old and in the hospital for strabismus surgery to attempt to correct a lazy eye (the first of three such surgeries over the years). It was my first real time away from home and family, and I was terrified. But my dad spent the whole night with me, sleeping in one of those crappy little hospital chairs. When I was awake, he read Peter Pan to me. I still have the book. Although he didn't get into mythology as much as I did, over the years he would buy me folklore collections or fairy tale books he'd find. One of the last ones he gave me was a collection of Disney fairy tales. He'd probably think we were crazy for epoxy-ing a fairy door to the front of the house, but he'd no doubt humor us.

"When the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a thousand pieces and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies." —James M. Barrie, creator of Peter Pan