It's All In the Wrist

We've been doing electrical work, and I've got the scars to prove it.

Kathy and I are refinishing the 3rd floor, adding new baseboard moldings and door trim. All of the old trim has come off, so we've had ugly exposed plaster and framing for a few weeks. That's not very pretty, so this week we started the long, slow process of making and installing the new trim.

We want to duplicate the trimwork on the lower floors as closely as possible, so that means making everything from scratch. To start with, we're making our own baseboard molding. We're doing it in two pieces that will be about 9 inches high when they're put together. The lower half of the trim is pretty plain, so we can do that with simple 1x6 dimensional lumber. It's the upper half that will be tricky, but that's a post for another day.

Ick. And no floor. 

But even the simple stuff is never simple. Before we put in the trim, we have to reorganize every single electrical outlet. Every room upstairs on the 3rd floor is different. Some have a lot of electrical outlets and some have almost none. Some are fed from the old knob-and-tube wiring and some have brand new modern (and grounded) Romex on a 15A or 20A breaker. It's a real mix. So we wanted to rationalize all of that. And since the downstairs rooms all have their outlets mounted within the baseboard trim, we wanted to do the same upstairs. So that means moving what outlets we have from their random locations scattered around the walls down to the same height, about 1.5 inches off the floor.

"As long as we're here..." Think Domino Effect.

The 3rd floor of this house has never had heat of any kind. No furnace, no fireplace, no nothing. So this seemed like a good time (meaning, the one and only time) to remedy that situation. We shopped around for awhile before finding some nice electric baseboard heaters that we liked. Each room upstairs will get one or two permanent heaters, and they'll all be fed by the new electrical wiring that we added a few years ago. Advance planning finally pays off!

Like threading a needle. Blindfolded. 

So the project now involves moving every single outlet on the entire floor, adding a bunch of new outlets where there weren't any, and routing power to a new set of baseboard heaters. All before the baseboards themselves can go in. So this "trim project" is really an electrical project.

But how do you run new electrical wiring in an old house? Where does it go? You can't just poke holes in the drywall and then patch it later like a modern home. So my plan was to bury the wiring behind the new baseboards. It would be out of sight, and semi-safe. We'll call this Plan A.

Technically, the wiring really should be protected by metal conduit so that someone doesn't accidentally drive a nail through it later. That would make it safer. It'll be a huge nuisance to bend all that conduit around the odd corners and angles upstairs, but it's doable. And I'll have to notch out the back of the baseboard to make a channel for the conduit. Call that Plan B.

But then Victorian architecture unexpectedly came to the rescue. The third floor has big exaggerated eaves on the outside, and this means there's a triangular-shaped space behind each wall. A space big enough to hide wires in. A-ha! Let's just route the wires in the hidden space behind each wall! It'll be safe and out of sight, and it leaves the original construction completely undamaged. Plus, I don't have to bend conduit or route a channel behind the molding. Let's go with Plan C.

At least the new wire is bright yellow. 

Piece of cake, right? Everyone knows how easy it is to just toss a coil of stiff electrical wire from one outlet to another one on the opposite side of the room. And hey, the holes for the outlets must be at least four inches wide. How can you miss? Never mind that you're doing it blind, behind a wall. And that your arms don't fit through the holes. And that 12/3 Romex is stiff and uncooperative. And that you have to magically "toss" this wire around corners. How hard can that be?

Pretty hard, as it turns out. I spent two solid days just teasing the %#@& wire from one outlet to the next. If both outlets were on the same wall, it was pretty straightforward. The eaves leave a big triangular space with no obstructions (okay, few obstructions) to get in the way. But coaxing the wire around corners was a real challenge.

After much experimentation, my preferred method was to use a long pole. First, I'd poke the wire through one hole in the wall, aim it toward the corner of the room, and just start pushing. Because 12-AWG wire is pretty stiff, it goes more or less where you point it -- for about two feet. After that, it droops and coils and goes wherever it wants to. But it's a start.

Bottles. Always with the bottles. 

Then, I try to fish the wire out from the opposite hole using a pole. At first, this was pretty easy. I caught the wire on the first try, so I figured I'd get all the rest of them done that afternoon. No, that was just beginner's luck. The gods were toying with me, because all the ones after that were exponentially more difficult.

(You'll notice in the photos above that there is no floor. The space in the eaves behind the walls just drops away, so if the wire starts pointing downwards, it's likely to go down a very long ways. Just adds to the challenge.) 

I taped a paperclip to a collapsible pole to make a hook to catch the wire. But how do you get a 10-foot pole through a 4-inch hole? Very carefully. I can collapse the pole so that it's only about 3 feet long, and then carefully poke that through the hole. Then I let it rest behind the wall, totally out of sight, and reach one hand through the hole and, little by little, expand the pole using my fingers. It takes a while, and really cramps up your hand after the tenth time, but it works. Now that I've got a long pole, I can wave it around behind the wall and try to catch the wire. And then try again. And again. Keep going... Almost got it... Maybe this time... C'mon, where is that %@#$ wire? You get the idea.

There's no way to see behind the wall (it's really dark) and putting my eye up to the hole doesn't tell me anything except that there's cobwebs and dust back there. (Don't inhale too deeply.) But you know what does fit? My phone. So after every dozen or so failed attempts to catch the wire I'd stick my phone through the hole, snap a flash photo, pull the phone back in, and examine the situation. I now have about a hundred photos of the insides of my walls. Can you say that?

Little by little, outlet by outlet, wall by wall, room by room, I got them all done. We now have shiny new wiring pulled all the way around the upstairs rooms, all fed by a total of six circuit breakers. That should be enough for all the new outlets as well as the new heaters. And if not, I can tell you just where you can put the extras.

Drip Rail

Some woodworking is decorative. Other times, it's just functional.

I made three drip rails the other day to try to stop some invasive water problems. The back of the house faces south, so it gets most of the sun and a lot of the wind. In wet weather, the rain often beats against the doors and windows on that side of the house. And in a couple of cases it's sneaking its way in.

I've caulked and sealed around the doors and windows, but water is crafty stuff. Like ants, but more persistent. So I finally got a clue from other parts of the house and installed drip rails over the affected openings.

They're not super fancy or anything, but they do the job. I modeled these after the drip rails on other parts of the house, particularly the second-floor roof overhang. It's just redwood 2x4 with the edges rounded over and then angled at about 40 degrees -- same as the rest of the house. I put a small kerf cut into the bottom surface to stop the water from wicking up the underside.

A few screws, some caulk, a little paint, and voila! Rain stopper.

The project was not without its complications, though. I almost goofed up and nailed a door shut. One of the doors opens outward, and I was about to install the drip rail so low that it would have blocked the door. Oops. Better raise that one up a few inches, boss.

The Hunt Begins

Now that the third floor has, well, a floor it's time to start on the next phase of the project: new molding.

The upstairs never had the same nice molding as the two lower floors. Instead, it's all just 1x6 painted in a variety of 1960s colors. We want the third floor to be as nice as the other two, so we need to duplicate some of the same trim work. Trouble is, the stuff downstairs is 120+ years old and they aren't making it anymore.

But we foresaw this problem. That's why we planned ahead and bought a secondhand Jet JPM-15 planer/molder, a massively heavy machine that turns ordinary wood into beautiful custom molding. Just push the button and whoosh! instant molding pops out. That's how it works, right?

Well, almost. There might be just a wee bit of prep work involved, but we'll talk about that later. For now, I need to find a way to replicate these rosette corner blocks. They're exactly 5 inches square and made of redwood, but I'd be happy with pine or just about anything else. It's easy to find similar corner blocks at a lumber yard -- heck, even Home Depot has something close -- but they're all too small and missing the octagon around the central rosette.

I don't have a lathe, so I can't make my own. And I don't know how I'd make the eight straight sides anyway, except maybe with the router. It would be tedious, but it might work.

I'd much rather find something ready-made, but I can't find any equivalents online. If anyone out there knows where we can get some, let us know! We'll even offer a bounty of... uh... some sacks of redwood sawdust.