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Can we talk about the outlet I rewired in my 1920s house that ate up 3 weekends?
Honestly I thought swapping one dead outlet in our bedroom would take an hour, tops. Turns out the old cloth wiring had crumbled inside the box, so I had to trace it back through the wall and found knob and tube spliced into newer romex in the crawlspace. Three weekends and about $80 in parts later, I finally got it working, and I still flip the breaker off twice before touching it. My grandpa used to do this stuff with a flashlight and no tester, which seems wild to me now. Has anyone else opened up an old box and found a surprise like this?
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quinn3418d ago
Did you check the whole run before you started splicing, or did you just fix what you could see? When I hit knob and tube in my 1940s place, the thing that saved me was drawing a rough map of every box on that circuit first. I also started using wire nuts with the little wings on them and pigtails instead of cramming connections back in the box, which made a huge difference. And yeah, buying a cheap non contact tester was the best $20 I ever spent, I still check every wire twice before I touch it. Old wiring is one of those jobs where the first surprise is never the last one.
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