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 I want to distract her from the disastrous bathroom and the super outdated kitchen with pretty, sparkly lights.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.

Walkie Talkies are a DIY Must Have

When Ted, my mom, and I went to Yucatan and Guatemala in 2005, we brought with us a set of walkie talkies. Most of the pyramid complexes are huge and sprawling. Mom didn't want to climb every single pyramid with us, but we didn't want to lose track of each other, either, so the walkie talkies worked really well. She could visit the market stalls and have a cool drink while we scrambled over ancient ruins, and we wouldn't have to worry about meeting up at a certain time--we just gave a shout when one of us was ready to head back.

We haven't used the walkie talkies since.

But this weekend, when the power mysteriously went out in one and a half rooms of the tenants' unit, it required a great deal of shutting the breaker on and off to test the connections down a length of wire. All three bedrooms of that unit, the bathroom, half the living room, and the refrigerator--not the whole kitchen, mind you, just the refrigerator--are on a single breaker. The power had gone out in the last bedroom/living room, so we needed to trace the length of the wire to see where it had gone faulty. (Ted eventually traced it to a connection in the middle bedroom, and got it working properly.)

I manned the breaker while Ted worked. The problem is the breaker is in the basement, the tenants' unit two floors up. Shouting doesn't work as a means of communication--you simply can't hear from that far away--and cell phones quickly became a hassle. The walkie talkies ended up being the perfect solution, and I'm glad we've found a second use for them.

Plus, they're pretty darn fun. Breaker 1-9.

Standard Grounded Outlets

Wow, it's been almost a week since I've found the time to post. We've been working almost non-stop on the house and yard as well as trying to get work-work done, that we've pretty much collapsed into bed at the end of each night.

The tenants moved in last week, and we worked on their unit until the night before they were to move in. Ted had gone about the task of swapping out the old outlets in their unit with brown standard grounded outlets. I found some nifty new cover plates for them, and they go a long way toward updating the look of the place. The outlets are from Lowes or Home Depot, I forget which, but the deco-style oil rubbed bronze plate covers came from Classic Accents. I love these. We'll be using them in the downstairs unit as well, and eventually will get the matching push-button switches.

Old--why do people paint over these? They're not hard to remove. It drives me crazy.

New. Pretty spiffy, eh?

As Ted replaced the outlets--some of which were practically hanging out of the walls--he also checked the general condition of the wiring. We do have some cloth wires, but a lot of the wiring looks like it was updated at some point and is in good condition.

Unfortunately, whoever did the update also took some shortcuts. Not everything was properly grounded, and some of the wire was strung bare in the wall. This is a recipe for disaster when you have bare wire coming into a sharp-edged box. For one outlet, the wires were actually sliced into by the box, and there was soot coating the wires and the box. Power had been arching in the wall for who knows how long.



So Ted replaced the wires and got them strung properly through conduit. While he did that, I had my first experience with plaster and lathe repairs. We had to move the outlet over about four inches in order to get the wires into conduit, which is probably why the previous owner didn't do it properly in the first place. Unfortunately, I don't have a photo of my awesome plastering skills. The job was small enough that I just used Plaster of Paris. Because there was a hole in the lathe, we used metal screen pulled flush with the backside of the plaster at the opening to act as a support for the new plaster. With several coats of plaster, it's now smooth.

Checking to make sure everything was installed and grounded properly took way more time than planned, but I think that for now--touch wood--we don't have to worry about anymore updates or repairs to the top unit and can focus our energies elsewhere.

Electrical Hazards, Courtesy of Uncle Jimmy

Part of getting ready for the tenants' arrival was cleaning the kitchen top to bottom. Sounds simple enough. Aside from the ironing board repair, we didn't anticipate having to do much else. So Ted moved out the stove and refrigerator to get at years of accumulated dust behind each one, and found one hell of an "Uncle Jimmy" setup.

A while back we started calling any dubious home repair, amateur fix-it, remuddling job, or downright dangerous setup an "Uncle Jimmy." It goes back to our home-search days, when our agent would say things like "Ugh, it looks like they got someone's Uncle Jimmy to fix that" instead of hiring a professional. So, basically, anything shoddily done is an "Uncle Jimmy."

I was fiddling with the blog when Ted came to find me. This "Uncle Jimmy" needed a second witness. I arrived with camera in hand.

The refrigerator was plugged into an adapter, which in turn was plugged into a 99-cent power cord:

This cheesy white power cord, along with the cord for the microwave, was plugged into a beat-up, cracked, badly damaged (and very, very cheap) black power strip:

The power strip was plugged into another cheap power cord:

This snaked behind a counter and behind the stove to join this mess:

At first, I couldn't entirely make out what was going on here; the entire thing was coated in thick, greasy dust. It's amazing there was never a fire. Clearing off some of the dust revealed that each half of the outlet had one of those 3-in-1 adapters, setting it up to hold six appliances/extension cords (even though the refrigerator/microwave extension was the only thing plugged in on one side).

Ted cleaned up the whole mess; unfortunately, I didn't get an "after" picture before moving the appliances back. He moved the microwave to the other side of the kitchen, where it is now plugged directly into its own outlet. The refrigerator is plugged into a cord that is rated for heavy use, and that goes directly into the outlet. The other half of the outlet powers the stove. Uncle Jimmy would be awed.

I know The Box House is an old house with only a few outlets in the kitchen at present, but sheesh. What were they thinking? We'll be installing some GFCI outlets in both kitchens--and more outlets period--sometime in the future.

Here's some additional info from the U.S. Products Safety Commission:

Limit Extension Cords To Reduce Risk Of Fire

WASHINGTON--If you use a lot of extension cords in your home or apartment, government safety experts say doing away with as many cords as possible can improve the safety of your home.

Noting that May is National Electrical Safety Month, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) said homeowners can use fewer extension cords by taking the simple step of relocating floor lamps, clocks, radios, television sets and other electrical products closer to wall receptacles.

According to CPSC estimates, there are some 4,600 residential home fires each year associated with extension cords; these fires kill 70 persons and injure some 230 others annually. Apart from fires, another 2,200 shock-related injuries happen with extension cords every year.

CPSC offered the following safety hints for using extension cords:

• Don't use an extension cords unless absolutely necessary. If you do, it must be marked #16 or some lower AWG number (the lower the number, the larger the wire and the more current the cord can safely carry). Also, the cord should bear the certification label of an independent testing laboratory. Do not use #18 extension cords which were previously used for floor lamps and other low-wattage electrical products.
• Always use 3-wire extension cords for appliances with 3-prong plugs. Never remove the third prong which is a safety feature designed to reduce chances of shock or electrocution.
• When disconnecting cords from outlets, always pull on the plug rather than the cord itself. Discard any old, cracked, worn or damaged extension cords.
• Don't overload cords by plugging in appliances that draw more watts than the rating of the cord. You can check this easily by examining the cord to see what its wattage rating is. Use heavy-duty cords for high wattage appliances. Use extension cords labeled for outdoor use when powering tools and garden products outside the home. Also, it is good practice to plug into an outlet protected by a ground-fault circuit interrupter (GFCI). The device shuts down power in milliseconds if the consumer is exposed to an electrocution or electrical burn hazard.
• Don't run cords under carpets or rugs since they prevent heat from being released by the cord.

A free brochure on safe use of extension cords is available from CPSC by sending a postcard to Cords, Washington, D.C. 20207.