Slacking on the posts.. slacking marginally less on the work

Today's project was installing electrical boxes for the outlets and lights downstairs

The other side of this wall is where the sawhorses with piles of siding live, so Dan did the measuring/marking/drilling/cutting from the backside

Everyone knows the trick to drill holes in the corners of an area you need to cut, right?

If you drill the four corners with a good size bit, you can go back with a skilsaw and easily start at one hole and cut straight to the other

This is the next outlet box over, which was much easier to get to, and the box for the lightswitch by the door. You can also see the thermostat at the upper left, so we'll have power, lights, AND heat in this room!!

The boxes are shimmed out with scraps of the 5/8" drywall that we'll be skinning the whole downstairs with. This way the boxes are already sitting at the correct final depth (Dan's good at thinking ahead like that..)

This is the back wall of the downstairs bedroom. I think we're covered on boxes back here!

The two round white circles are covers for the light boxes for sconces we're going to put over the bed in there, and 2 of the outlet boxes are for switches for those

The dangly white square on the left is currently the only outlet for that side of the house. It used to be outside, but wound up walled in on the inside after the foundation work. I was annoyed at the time, but it's turned out to be very convenient.

And then it was my turn to put up a few boxes..

Look, plastic outlet boxes attached to studs. Exciting stuff, wouldn't you say?

Everything went well until I got to this spot where we need to fit a 4-switch box between a forest of studs spaced just a little too closely together..

..my chiseling skills are very rusty (as was the chisel when I finally found it.. but I sharpened it before I started so I can't really blame the mess on the tool)

The box finally fit though, so all's well that ends well

the end

we've got the Power!

200 Amps of it!!

With 3 floors of living space, plus a workshop with a plasma cutter and welder, our rickety 100 amp service was not gonna cut it.. Plus, only the middle floor had anything resembling modern wiring, or working outlets for that matter.

We knew we needed to bring more power to the house, and since there was an existing subpanel on the middle floor already, it worked out very nicely to have a separate subpanel for each floor.

<-- Here's the subpanel in the garage/workshop.

Not sure if you can tell, but all the circuits are labeled correctly!! Ok, so there's only the one for the sump pump so far.. but it's very exciting that there's not a long list of wrong mappings to sort through, and since we'll write down each circuit as we run it, it'll always be right. For the rest of our lives!!! (if you don't think that's exciting, my explaining wouldn't help










<-- Here's the new main panel, with a shiny new meter too!

Now, if only that would stop spinning so fast we'd be in good shape. It's starting to warm up a little, and haven't had jackhammers running all month, so this was the first month our electric bill inched down a little.. but it's still waay higher than it should be. By next winter we'll have the radiant heat up and running, so all our space heaters can be retired and donated away. In the meantime, I stand by the decision that the our crazy electric bill is well worth tradeoff for not being able to see my breath in the bathroom in the morning.

Here's Dan framing in the roughout for the subpanel on the top floor -->

<-- And here's the subpanel for our master bedroom suite, aka the top floor.

It's kinda nice that when our bedroom and office are done, if we blow a circuit while say, both blow drying our hair and microwaving hot pockets in the bathroom, we won't have to go down one or two flights of stairs to reset it!

We tried to get a permit to start running the wiring and installing outlets and lights downstairs, but no luck. We need to work on the plans and try again.. maybe next week..