woohoo…more fun today. We found out that the downstairs living room light was knob and tube stuff, which connected to something upstairs. we started exploring and found a small “room”…kind of a dead space under the eaves" that had been walled off since the house was built. we cut a hole and found there was a stack of about 40 or so post cards sitting there in the middle of this dead space, the newest having a postmark of 1910. the oldest about 1905. We started looking into a way into the attic and finally had to cut a hole through the ceder plank cieling. turns out there were two entrances to the attic…both had been sheetrocked over.
we finally tracked down the source of the knob and tube wiring and found that while the 2nd floor was fed by a couple of romex wires those wires were tied directly into the knob and tube stuff. Luckily I have an electrician who will work for barter. The entire 2nd floor will have to be rewired.
My family moved into my house in 1958, when I was 13. The former owner had supposedly been an engineer, and had a unique sense of “home improvement.” I remember my father discovering that one of the dining room receptacles wasn’t working, so he opened it up, only to discover that it was wired with a simple lamp cord, which disappeared into a hole in the floor. The cord emerged in the basement, and was plugged into an extension cord, which was plugged into another extension cord, which was plugged into a ceiling light/outlet over the basement sink.
To this day, more than 50 years later, I’m still encountering bizarre things that can be traced back to the original owner . . . like the fact that the light over the kitchen sink is on the same circuit as the ceiling fan in my bedroom, in an entirely different part of the house.
My father is one of those guys who considers himself an expert in all things he has no training for. When my folks moved into their first owned house, he decided he’d fix the wiring. No, he’s not an electrician.
(Before anyone dies of heart failure, he did EVENTUALLY get the house rewired. Eventually.)
However, for at least **five years ** (thinking on it, it actually could have been a lot longer; you kind of get used to it after a while) we had the following:
[ul]
[li] He’d pulled out part of the door frame in the lounge room to get to where the wiring was for the lounge room lights. He didn’t put it back on, and he left unshielded wires just hanging there. In reaching for the switch in the dark you had a very good chance of putting your hands on live wires. I electro-shocked myself regularly until after about six months or so I got really, really good at guessing where the light was vs where the wires were.[/li][li]The laundry room was wired to the lights circuit. When the washing machine inevitably overloaded the circuit and tripped it out, we’d lose all lighting to the house.[/li][li]To fix the problem of that pesky overloading fuse, my father replaced the offending fuse with a nail. :eek:[/li][/ul]
How I survived my childhood is still a matter of horrified speculation for me.