First Pizza

Week 33, Day 228

When a new astronomical telescope gets used for the very first time, the event is called “first light.” It marks the end of testing and calibration and the readiness of the instrument for use. What you see above is the analogous “first pizza.” That happened last Friday, and it was a BBQ chicken with banana peppers. It was lovely. Our homemade Friday pizza tradition is back!

But don’t kid yourself, the renovation is not finished yet. We spent all of last week continuing the move into the downstairs, but that still isn’t done. For example, here is my future office as of yesterday afternoon:

Not exactly functional, but progress continues. On the other hand, here’s the guest bedroom:

Definitely still in need of some art on the walls, but otherwise completely usable. And that is a good thing since our first houseguest arrives in a couple of days.

You might be wondering what, if anything, happened last week as far as the actual renovation goes. Well, the big news is that we passed our final electrical inspection. The only remaining inspection is the final building inspection itself, which is currently planned for after our first guest leaves.

Beyond that, what remains to be done includes:

• exterior painting
• replace the concrete in the entryway
• replace a skylight and paint the tunnel leading up to it
• a few tiny odds and ends

I think most of that will actually happen later in July, rather than earlier. And all of that is simple to do.

But I know my audience, at least to some degree. You’re interested in the weird renovation stories, right? This week I have three.

First story: The shelves in the library

We have some simple Ikea bookcases in that room. And they have a cutout at the bottom to go around whatever baseboard you have. But what we discovered is that the baseboard we selected is too tall, and the cutout isn’t big enough to deal with it. Thus, I spent some time cutting up a few old melamine shelves and putting them under the bookcases to make them fit against the wall. Here’s a photo from things while I was testing to be sure it would work:

And here’s a photo of the final result:

Once those were properly cut, the bookcases went up and got loaded with CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays, and (of course) books. But I didn’t anticipate having to get out the chop saw and the table saw to install the bookcases.

What isn’t obvious in those photos is that the bookcases are very tall and come in two parts. Putting the topper on each one requires all the space available at the ceiling now that they sit a bit higher than they used to. Had that not worked out, I don’t know what I would have done.

Side note: a couple of the bookcases were upstairs during the reno, and when they were emptied and moved, we found mould on the wall behind them. Apparently the house isn’t properly insulated in that area, and water condensed back there, leading to mould growth. That’s something we will have to fix eventually. In the meantime, the mould has been wiped out.

Second story: Electrical weirdness part 1

At one point during the (still ongoing) move downstairs, I plugged in the vacuum cleaner and turned it on, only to have it immediately stop working. This was in the living room, and the plugs there had previously been used. But the electrician had come back to do their final work, and his apprentice had worked on the panel in the garage, which contains the breaker for those plugs.

I wound up opening up the breaker box and discovered that the apprentice had mixed up two neutral wires. Code requires arc-fault breakers in this case, and those breakers need the neutral wire to be connected to the breaker rather than to the bus bar in order to detect the faults they respond to. When the neutral for that circuit got connected to the wrong place, any use of those outlets popped the breaker immediately. I figured that out and got the neutral wires back into the correct places, and the problem was resolved. Everything worked properly once again.

This was actually an easy mistake to make, to be honest. The wires coming into the breaker box were right next to each other in the corner, and mixing them up was a simple error to make.

Yes, I told the electrician about this, but more on that below.

Third story: Electrical weirdness part 2

After putting up the bookcases, I got out the vacuum cleaner once again and plugged it in in the library, only for it to fail just like the previous case. But while this may sound familiar, it’s actually different.

I opened up the main breaker box and discovered that two different breakers had flipped. That seemed odd, so I reset them both and tried again. Same result. A breaker labelled “library plugs” and one labelled “upstairs plugs” both popped when I turned on the vacuum cleaner.

That sounded like the same sort of crossed neutral wire issue, but this was in the main breaker box, and the actual electrician had worked on it, not his apprentice. Still, I took the cover off and traced the wires. Turns out they were not crossed; they were wired properly.

So why would using power on one circuit cause two breakers to pop?

Obviously they must be connected together somehow.

So I went upstairs looking for what plugs or lights were off when that “upstairs plugs” breaker was turned off. I found only one plug in that state, and it’s one that we’d worked on from the backside in the living room. In fact, it was an odd case. We replaced the wire bringing power to the plug but were unable to figure out where the wire carrying power elsewhere actually went. The electrician and I scratched our heads over that, but whatever it did was upstairs, and we weren’t working on the wiring up there. We figured it would become obvious in the future, or not.

After more pondering, I decided that since we knew how the new wire got from the breaker box to the plug, whatever was oddly connected must be on the wire leaving the plug and going off who-knows-where. So, with the power off, I opened up the outlet and disconnected everything, leaving wires hanging out in space. Then I turned the power back on to confirm which wire was the one connected to the breaker.

Surprise! Both wires had power when the “upstairs plugs” breaker was on, and neither had power when it was off.

What?!?

Someone in the past had connected the wires to that plug in a loop, which is not a good thing to do. Nothing that the electrician had done would cause that. This was an error in the 1994 wiring somewhere.

I decided that since that was the case, one obvious thing I could do was simply ignore one set of wires. Power would get to everywhere regardless, and the change would break the loop. So I did that:

The wires on the left are marked “Do Not Use” while the wires on the right drive the plug and go back to the breaker box via the new wire we installed months ago. Once that was done, suddenly everything worked again. I could run the vacuum cleaner in the library and in Anne’s office without any issues at all.

I can’t claim I understand this completely. There must be a place where the neutral wires for the two circuits are tied together in a wall upstairs. And back in 1994 when the second floor was added, it didn’t matter. The circuit breakers used then only connected to the hot wire, not the neutral. All the neutrals simply tied back together in the breaker box anyway, so connecting them together in a junction box was just fine. But now that code requires arc-fault breakers or ground-fault circuit interruptor (GFCI) breakers on at least some circuits, things get sketchy if you don’t keep the neutral wires separate.

In any event, my “fix” worked.

A few days later the electrician arrived to install the required breaker description lists in each breaker box. I told him about both of these issues, and his response was that I had done his job for him. He wasn’t exactly thrilled with the apprentice’s work, but such is life. Someone probably got talked to, but I will never know about that if it happened. He did know there was an oddity with the neutral wires in the library plugs circuit, however, because he’d had the breaker pop on him when he was installing a light in a closet. He had to change which neutral it connected to in order to avoid that.

In short, he was very pleased with what I had done and even later told our general contractor that I was “right on top of these things” and that “you don’t often see that in a homeowner.”

Finally, this week, I leave you with a photo taken while walking the dog. A neighbour has one of those fake owls that are intended to scare off birds. In this case, I think it’s intended to be purely decorative, but even so, it’s obvious it’s not doing the job:

Someone really isn’t getting the message.

So, the next couple of weeks will probably have nothing to do with the renovation and instead be about entertaining our guest. After that, we’ll plow back into the reno and get it wound up.

Enjoy your summer!