House report 26: Daisy Chains

Monday, 4 September

One of the things that I find most frustrating about home renovation projects is the daisy chain effect.
For instance - we can't put the last window on the downstairs wall in until the stucco around the back slider is fixed. Can't fix the stucco until we get the kitchen window changed out, unless we want to pay for stucco repair twice (we don't). So we have the kitchen window on order, and the last window sitting in the garage and we're waiting for the chain of events to come to a conclusion before we can finish.

Today was supposed to be a quick and easy upgrade - ceiling fans for the kids' rooms. It was supposed to take two hours, three tops. It's part of our current daisy chain effect - we're putting a floor in the attic so that we can put the attic stuff actually into the attic instead of the spare bedroom. But we have to at least cut the boxes for the upstairs ceiling fans into the ceilings, because once the attic floor goes down we won't have access to the ceilings anymore, so any new wiring has to be run now.

There was always a potential issue with the wiring. When we were working on the house there was one switch in the master bedroom that nobody could figure out. We call it the switch to nowhere, because it does nothing that we can tell.

So, the ceiling fans/wiring/attic floor daisy chain turned into a sixteen hour nightmare of wiring, wiring, wiring. I don't understand any of it, but Jeff says the people who wired the house when they built it should have been fired. There are circuits that go nowhere and one circuit that has the upstairs bathroom and one light in the downstairs front room on it, and nothing else (how? How does that even happen?). There was much frustration and much sending endoscopic cameras into walls today. After lunch there was much ripping off of drywall in the upstairs bathroom (aaaggghhh! Again??). After sixteen hours (I kid you not, we started at 7am with a trip to Home Depot and finished at 10:30pm) Jeff has it figured out, if not fixed, and we have power in the upstairs outlets once again and a plan for next weekend.

There will be ceiling fans in the kids rooms.