Electrical Fire Hazard -- The Unexpected Discovery of Old Wire

The electrical breaker boxes for our house were updated in 1973, according to a receipt we found in the basement. Conduit to power extra outlets / light bulbs was strung along the basement ceiling at the same time. While the boxes were professionally installed, it looks like the previous owners added the conduit themselves. (It looks like a hack job and wasn't on the receipt.)

We're considering upgrading the service and having the basement rewired. So we peeked into some of the connecting boxes and were horrified at what we discovered. Our best guess is that the electrician left behind a pile of old cloth wire that was removed during the breaker boxes upgrade, and the previous owners decided to reuse it in new connector boxes. That's 1920s wire going through 1970s  boxes.

Old cloth-wrapped wire going through sharp-edged conduit.

Old, uncapped wire, held together only with old tape.

Oh, yeah, we're going to have to remediate this sooner rather than later.

Renovation Recap, New Tenants In

I barely crawled out of bed yesterday. I think all the stress of prepping the tenants' unit, getting ready for and taking a week-long vacation, and juggling real work had caught up with me. I woke up with one whopper of a cold: scratchy eyes, sore throat, stuffed head, congestion, the works. So I dosed up on Nyquil, didn't get out of my jammies, and brought one of my client projects to bed with me, although I didn't actually get much work done on it.

I'm feeling much, much better today, and rather self-satisfied with all the work we did accomplish. We pretty much hauled butt on the tenants' unit, taking advantage of a few weeks of down time between tenants.

In three weeks, this is what we did. There are links to some of the projects:

Bedroom #1
Updated electrical, including new wiring and installation of a reproduction push button switch
Stripped the original sconces, refinished them in silver, and rewired them
Painted the room blue using Behr Venetian plaster
Replaced all switch plate and socket covers

Bedroom #2
Updated electrical, including new wiring and installation of a reproduction push button switch
Stripped the original sconces, refinished them in gold, and rewired them
Installed new smoke detector

Bathroom
Repaired door so that it closes
Recaulked tub

Kitchen
Installed new lock on door (the old one was unsafe, and not up to code, requiring a key to lock from the inside)

Dining Room
Updated electrical, including new wiring and installation of a reproduction push button dimmer switch
Replaced light fixture with a vintage chandelier, which Ted rewired before installing
Painted the room Tuscan Tan using Behr Venetian plaster

Living Room
Updated electrical
Found the original light switch hidden in the wall, and restored
Found the original sconce boxes hidden in the wall, and restored
Rewired and installed a set of sconces, circa 1920, found on eBay
Installed new ceiling fan, where there was no other light fixture
Painted the room using Behr Venetian plaster

Basement
Cleared one of the rooms in the basement to create a storage area for tenants

Garage
Although not related to the tenants, we cleared a lot of crap out of the garage

Garden
I created two new flower beds along the front of the house, pictures to come

Whew! I think I need another vacation!

I'm sure I'm forgetting a few things on the list, so I'll let Mom and Ted chime in to remind me. Now that the new tenants are in, we can refocus our attention to other portions of the house. Upcoming projects include Mom's bedroom, installing two new doors in the basement, and clearing out (the goal) 30% of the junk in the basement as we reorganize all storage areas. Oh, and Ted and I have hopes of moving to the basement soon. We'll see how that goes.

Fan and Antique Art Deco Sconce Lights Finally Installed

Well, the rewiring of the living room took longer than planned--doesn't everything?--but we now have a new fan, antique sconces, and a new push button switch to match the one Ted installed in the dining room.

With the discovery that there were once sconces above our fireplace, we were quite excited to find vintage replacements on eBay. The patent date on the back of these says 1926, one of the three possible dates our house was built (1925 and 1928 being the other dates we've seen). Perfect.

Ted rewired the sconces and installed them last night. (If you're in the Chicago area, Marshall Electric offers some great deals on supplies.) I wanted to use flicker bulbs, but they really didn't produce enough light. Instead, we're using 40 watt (at least I think they're 40 watt) amber bulbs.

The effect is really cool.

The pattern on the surface of the bulbs creates wavy patterns on the walls and ceiling. It kind of reminds me of vintage theatre lighting:

And when you switch on the light of the new overhead fan, the whole room takes on a soft, cozy glow. Even though it was nearly 2 o'clock in the morning when we finished, we had to run outside to see how it looked from the street.

We had discovered that in the forties, a previous owner had removed whatever fixture was on the ceiling and capped it over, removed the sconce lights and plastered over the wall, and removed the only light switch in the room and plastered that over, too. That left only four--or is it five?--floor-level receptacles for plug-in lamps. For the life of me, I can't figure out what their motivation was. It looks so much better now.

Mystery of the Missing Sconces

Heave, ho, heave, ho...

Pulling new wire through the conduit has become fairly routine. We're all rather horrified at the state of some of the old cloth wire, and the sooner it gets replaced the better.

But we can't leave the old wire laying around for a minute, unless we want it chomped.

We've been coiling it up and putting it outside by the trash, where the tinkers come to collect it long before the garbage man does.

Now, a few weeks ago I mentioned our suspicions that there might once have been sconces above the fireplace.

Well, Ted and Seamus inspected the wall above the fireplace carefully...

Made some test drills...

And BINGO! We found the old electrical boxes.

(Now if only I could find that pesky hairbrush before the camera comes out.)

As before, these electrical boxes were stuffed with newspaper.

Only this time they yielded a precious clue! The Sears advertisement was announcing a sale for Friday, March 13, 1942; sixty-seven years ago to the day. We found it rather funny that we opened up the wall right before Friday the 13th last week.

So, it was less than twenty years after The Box House was built that someone decided to remove the sconces and plaster over the wall. (We had guessed late forties, so we weren't too far off.)

But I think I know what happened to the sconces.

Four of the six bedrooms in The Box House have sconce lights, two in the upstairs unit and two in the downstairs one. Two of those rooms, both upstairs, have rather simple (and rather heavily painted over) candle sconces. One of the bedrooms downstairs has sconces that are plain, and perhaps of more recent vintage. And then there are these in my mom's room (this is one of two):

Of course, with all the white paint slathered on them at the moment they're not looking their best. But the detail on them is of a knight on horseback trampling a dragon. My guess is that it's supposed to represent St. George. Anyway, they match our Medieval-style electric fireplace, original to the house. (Go here to see a video of the fireplace in action.)

I'm hoping there is a way to strip the paint off the sconces without destroying the polychrome finish, but we'll see. If not, I'll just have to repaint them and "antique" them to give the appearance of age.

However, those particular sconces won't be going back above the fireplace. Mom likes them in her room, and they've now been there far longer than they hung in the living room--if the date on the newspaper is a true indicator of when the sconces were removed, then before she was born!

Instead, we found another vintage set of sconces on eBay:

You can't tell from this photo, but the candle bulbs go behind the fancy grill work, which curves around them; they are going to cast amazing shadows on the walls, and I think they complement the shapes in the stained glass windows nicely.

We've pulled new wire through the conduit to replace the old...

...and now we're just waiting for the sconces to arrive!