We've been continuing to make slow progress getting the upstairs bedrooms rewired, and helping #Wattsworth become a more grounded being. We finally reached the point where cutting off the power to the next section of wiring would become an inconvenience to us. The power would be cut to the room we're using to store our clothing, as well as to the next room, and to the bathroom which has the shower with the best water pressure, which is therefor preferable in many cases. We decided to do a push over the weekend leading into the late December holiday times to get those rooms down, and back up, as quickly as possible. I was hoping we could manage it with no more than 3 days of disruption of our usual routines.
We got the closet-room sorted out on the same day as we cut that set of power. Old wires out, new wires in. And we got the old wires out of the second room! We were ahead of schedule. I love it when that happens. The second day, I enlarged some holes that I knew I'd need to run more cable through, and we got the cables fished and run for the second room. I then went to look at the situation in the bathroom.
Now, if you recall, (I may or may not have actually shared this) there are two bathrooms at this end of the building, one on either side of the hallway. The first one was an adventure to get rewired (you can read about that here), but I was confident that this one wouldn't be nearly as bad, as instead of having to dangle myself over a chasm through a tiny gap in a wall, this side was accessible by merely ducking a half-wall and avoiding some glass beer bottles left behind by... someone. So I expected I'd be able to just clamber back there, and rewire everything.
Boy was I wrong.
Now, the ducking and clambering was about what was expected, and tracing the cables wasn't difficult either. The power ran from the previous light to a drop down to where it was reasonable to assume the light switch was, and back up from the light switch to a ceiling fan junction box, and from that box out to the combination light and extraction fan above the shower, and to the lights above the sink. ..with a strange bonus cable running back up from the sink area over to the hallway.. but I'll get back to that in a bit.
Because.. ordinarily, if we ignore the bonus cable, this would have been a perfectly sensible way to wire things up. Except for one key feature.
There is no ceiling fan in this bathroom. The only fan in the room is the one above the shower.
So before touching any of these cables, I went back downstairs to check that there wasn't an obvious access that I'd just overlooked somehow.
If you aren't aware, the way that typical ceiling fans are rigged, there's a special type of junction box for. It's essentially a metal box that's attached to a metal bracket that is suspended between two of the beams that make up a ceiling. This gives the needed support for the extra weight of a ceiling fan. Where you have Sheetrock ceilings, the bracket ends up living sandwiched between the beams and the Sheetrock, with a hole cut out of the rock to allow access to the box, which has its opening facing down into the room, so that the person installing the fan can rig the wires in the ways they need to. The attic part of that is just dropping wires through the knock out holes in the otherwise solid walls of the box.
Key point here, there's not access to how the wires have been connected to each other inside the box from the attic side of one of these things.
And when I went downstairs to get a sense of where everything was I discovered something decidedly unsettling.
There was no access to the inside of that box from the inside of the room either. The box in question had been completely mudded over at some point in some renovation. This is a Bad Idea. It's perfectly fine to close up a box with an appropriate cover, and painting that over is fine too, but rocking it in so it's not accessible without guessing where it is and hitting it with a hammer to break open the substance holding the ceiling together? ...not how we like to see things done. It's work-around-able though. I can just bring a different junction box up there, and while I may not know exactly how the wires were connected, I'm not going to be using any of those wires again anyway, so I can set up the new ones in a way that makes sense for the use. Annoying, but no big deal really.
And that bonus wire? It ran to an exit sign above a back door of the space! That was a fun discovery, though we haven't yet decided what we're going to do with that information. For now.. we know that channels to run power to it exist, more can be decided later.
So, after a break for coffee and snacks, I prep to return to the attic, and Russ pulls down the light above the sink. (The light/fan above the shower has all of it's connections on the attic side, so didn't have to be pulled down to be connected in).
And then he calls me over to be an extra hand to disconnect the light fixture while he holds it over his head, having finally cut the paint that was sealing it to the wall enough to free the thing. I disconnect the clip connector easily enough but am left saying, simply, "What The Fuck" while staring at the space where this light fixture had been.
As is often the case, the fixture had a hanging bracket, which is sized to allow screws to go into the expected part of a junction box, expanding the bracing against the wall, but largely hanging the thing from the junction box.
This bracket had been screwed directly into drywall. Now, it's fairly obvious why this had been done, as the junction box in question was not centered above the sink, presumably because it was attached to a stud that was off to the side of the sink. But what was fascinating to see was that someone had clearly wired in the light inside the junction box, run the thinner cables (with the clip connector) out of the junction box, through a bit of cut-away drywall to the center of the hanging bracket, in order to reach the fixture. They had then crammed paper in the junction box of some kind and MUDDED OVER THREE QUARTERS OF THE BOX So, while power came out of the box.. once again, the actual wiring connections are completely inaccessible without cutting into drywall! This is decidedly not safe, and while I can't tell for sure what the paper like substance that was crammed in that box is.. it seems far too likely that they made a giant fire hazard out of this situation. Investigation of the switch in this room found that even the screws holding the switch in place had been mudded over, because clearly no one ever expected to need to update anything in this bathroom ever again on the last remodel.
After much discussion it was decided that clearly the existing wiring should absolutely not be powered back up, but that we are not quite ready to decide how to move forward. We've been planning on replacing the sink in this bathroom for months, but have been putting that on hold 'till the electrical was done, and no matter what we chose to do, there will be some kind of drywalling mess. So, the existing was cut away and a temporary box to hold the end of a cable running power from the lights in the next room over to above the bathroom was installed, so we could both put the light in the other room back in, and safely wait to figure this out till we're done finishing up the last few pieces of the rest of the electrical work. We're relabeling that problem as part of the bathroom remodel, and putting our sights on that, hopefully quite soon.
So that's where we're at. I'm angry at whomever did this (otherwise so very pretty) drywalling in this bathroom and the reno on this room just became significantly more complicated.