Hey, Sparky!

I guess we should have seen this one coming.

When the floor installers were here (more on that project soon), they accidentally cut through a wire that we didn't know was there. It sparked and tripped the circuit breaker, in addition to startling the poor guy. The net effect was that it cut off power to Kathy's upstairs office and to my closet, but most other things on the 3rd floor seemed to work okay.

Our job then became finding the cut wire and figuring out where/how it was routed. Again, we didn't even know it was there. We thought we'd uncovered all the hidden wiring when we removed the baseboards. Guess not.

The tricky thing was, we couldn't find any wire where the guy said he'd cut it. He'd sliced something with his Dremel tool and made sparks, but I couldn't see any wire, or even any indication that there was wiring nearby. Had he mistaken the location? Was I looking in the wrong place? What gives?

We pried off some molding, unscrewed some outlets, tugged on some wires, and came to the inescapable conclusion that there must be some invisible wiring right about... here. And sure enough, we dug away at the corner of the room and found it carefully buried underneath layers of plaster. They'd somehow stuck a vertical run of wire in the seam where two walls meet. Crafty. And totally nonstandard and unsafe.

I wound up disassembling two closets, one in Kathy's office and one in mine, to uncover this run and figure out where it started and where it ended. And then it started to get weird.

There wasn't just one wire buried vertically in the wall, there were two. One was live and one wasn't. Huh? How does that work? Turns out, there was a tape splice down near the floor, entirely buried in the wall. The floor installer had apparently cut one leg of the Y, leaving half of the circuit working and half dead. Great. So now we get to deal with an unsafe tape splice inside a wall as well as two sets of buried wire. This just gets better and better.

The live half of the circuit led to another tape splice, also buried. And tracing the wire back to its source revealed a third tape splice, also buried inside a wall. Sheesh. Haven't these people heard of junction boxes? Or was taping up and plastering over your wiring normal back in the day?

Little by little, we managed to dig most of the wiring out of its hiding place. We'll probably leave a few short runs in place, but disconnected from everything, simply because it's too much trouble to dig it out and would damage the walls unnecessarily.

To make up for the missing/damaged wiring, I ran some shiny new Romex -- grounded, this time -- from a nearby outlet, around the top of a door frame, and over to the corner of the room. We're approaching our goal of having zero ungrounded outlets in the house. And we're a bit closer to eliminating or abandoning most of the old wiring.

As long as there are no more surprises, that it.