It was a simple request and not the first time Jett had made it. This time it came at the start of the 3-day Christmas weekend, just after I announced my intention of making major progress on the conversion of the office into the new master bedroom. I acknowledged the value of the extra outlet (as the main bathroom in the house has just one) but a little Builder Bob voice in the back of my head was saying “It’s a trap!”
There is a limit as to how many times I can put Jett off and the limit had been reached on this request. So with a deep sigh and a fond farewell to my weekend plans, I embarked on the new task. I plunged in, thinking that if things went well I could do it in half a day. After all, I just needed to cut a small hole in the bathroom wall, fish a line down next to the sewer pipe, run it over to the electric panel, drop a new breaker in the box and a new outlet or two on the other end of the line, patch up the hole and done.
Yeah.
The first problem appeared in the form of an opportunity. The second floor of our house is served by just two electric circuits while over 25 serve the rest of the house. This is a reflection of the fact that the second floor is the least renovated space in the building. The previous owners had converted half of the third floor into a fourth bedroom and had completely redone the first floor. The second floor got an updated bath, but they neglected to update the electrical. The opportunity I saw was in the form of an outlet in the master bedroom which just happened to be in the vicinity of the hole I needed to cut in the bathroom wall. Hmmm… if I ran TWO lines I could provide an additional circuit to relieve those overloaded existing circuits by running the line to that bedroom outlet and whatever else ran off the circuit at that point. It turned out that the only other thing on that circuit downstream from that outlet was the rest of the bathroom, so running the second line would completely isolate the bathroom from the rest of the floor, electrically speaking. Seemed worth doing since it was just a “little extra work” (ah, the words that consume the home repairman’s life!). And I might as well put in two bathroom outlets instead of one. Make it a 20 amp line with enough power for all of Jett’s beauty machinery running at once. And maybe put one of those outlets on a switch.
The project was getting a little bigger. Now it looked like a whole day, even if things went well.
My optimism survived through the trip to Home Depot where I got the wire, outlets, switches, drywall and conduit I would need. The conduit – bright blue flexible tubing – was a whim. I knew that the space next to the sewer line was tight and thought that threading a single conduit would be simpler than threading two electric cables. That burst of inspiration, I believe, saved the project.
Things began to go wrong when I cut the small hole in the bathroom wall. Looking down into the wall and seeing the jumble of old construction debris and not much else, I knew immediately that the hole would need to be much larger. Making it a foot square didn’t help much, so I took a deep breath and ripped it open to the baseboard.
The Gaping Hole
The intent of the large hole was to provide better access to the base of the sewer pipe and make it easier to thread the conduit to the basement. Alas, what the hole revealed was that my assumption that the sewer dropped straight to the basement was tragically flawed: the sewer line actually went horizontal at the base of the wall and ran nearly 5 feet under the adjacent linen closet before dropping down. A belated measurement of the position of the pipe in the sewer confirmed this sad fact. There would be no straight drop of the electrical lines, with or without the plastic conduit. I was going to have to contend with a zig-zag.
My measurements strongly suggested that the sewer pipe dropped to the basement below the hallway wall. So with yet another deep breath, I cut a hole in this wall, which I had just recently finished painting. It turned out to be some of the remaining old horsehair plaster – very fragile and unhappy at being assaulted by my hammer. My small hole soon became a spider web of cracked and crumbling plaster. Worse, the hole revealed no sewer pipe. Two holes and still no way to thread the wires.
As they say in poker, I was now “pot committed” – I had invested too much to quit. The next option was to rip up the floor in the linen closet. This was new hardwood, installed just two years ago. Ripping it out was every bit as painful to me as it was to the wood. When I cut through the subflooring, the sub subflooring and the sub sub sub flooring – the floor in this case was over 3 inches thick – I realized that the hole was on the wrong side of a joist. So I cut a second hole and finally was able to see where the sewer line dropped down. Unfortunately it was indeed under the wall and not directly accessible. I thought, though, that if I could run the conduit up the shaft, I could reach over and grab it.
The Holes in the Linen Closet Floor
Down to the basement. Time to ram that blue conduit upward and pray like hell that I didn’t encounter any obstructions. It wasn’t easy and even when I felt that I had pushed up enough conduit to reach the second floor, I did not see it appear under the linen closet floor. I was feeling sick, thinking that I would have to declare failure, suffer Jett’s disappointment and spend the rest of the weekend repairing holes that would forever mock me. But then, when all seemed lost, I spotted a tiny patch of blue between the water lines. The conduit! It wasn’t in a position to grab and further pushing did not yield any additional progress. But could I grab the wires if I fed them through?
Back down to the basement. Find a scrap piece of electrical wire that I could use as a fish line. Run it up the conduit. And pray.
Back to the linen closet. Hallelujah, Lord! The wire was there and with only a few scrapes from the rough hole, was able to reach in and grab it!
Back to the basement. Rip open the two coils of wire. Try connecting them to the fish line using loops and electrical tape. Realize that the resulting knot is too large for the conduit. Cut off the loops. Tape one line to the fish line and the other line to the first line.
Back to the linen closet. Pull, pull, pull. Feeling every bit as proud as a fisherman hauling a prize marlin from the sea, I really put my back into it and was finally rewarded with the beautiful sight of electrical tape popping out of the conduit. But the moment of joy turned to a moment of dread as the tape snapped and I was left holding a fish line with no fish. But the two wires were too tightly packed into the conduit to fall back, so I was able to reach in, grab the lines and complete the routing of the lines under the linen closet to the gaping bathroom wall hole.
The rest of the job was fairly straightforward. I looked at the hole in the hallway wall as an opportunity. Hell, we needed another outlet in the hall, too, so when I wired the bathroom outlet I ran a line back under the linen closet floor and threaded it through to the hallway hole. I am still patching the wall, but we now have a second functioning outlet in the hall.
The Hallway Outlet
The wiring of the bathroom outlet was a real bitch (just ask Jett who witnessed my cursing). I needed every inch of that 50 feet of 12 gauge wire. If I had cut even two more inches off when I chopped those fish line loops I would have had to patch the line. But I didn’t and was able to complete the job with no further trauma.
Let me tell you, I felt damn good when I turned those two breakers on for the first time and nothing exploded. In fact, it all worked flawlessly – the unswitched 20 amp GFI outlet, the switched outlet, the new outlet in the hallway, the new outlet in the bedroom and the rewired old bathroom outlet and light, now being fed off a new 15 amp line. Lovely.
The Bathroom Outlet
It is now Monday afternoon and I am waiting for the second coat of joint compound to dry so that I can sand and paint the patches. The hardwood floor has been reinstalled in the linen closet (I had some remaining scraps that were sufficient). I am fairly confident that I will be able to complete my half-day job within the three days of the weekend.
It is a different kind of Christmas joy, but joy nonetheless.