Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Bob's My Uncle - Electrical Cable Up-date

It’s finally done! The cable is now in the basement. Now all that needs to be done is hooking it up to the new breaker box. That will wait till we have the new main line installed.

Here are some pics for your enjoyment.

As I told y'all I'd do, here's a pic of the tiny plumbing chase hatch next to the toilet.

Don't you just LOVE that green toilet?! It matches the green in the kitchen!

We know the kitchen was remodeled in the 50s, but I'm thinking they might have repainted the kitchen sometime in the early 70s. The date stamp on the toilet is for '73. They probably ordered the kitchen paint when they ordered the bathroom fixtures! The tub is even that color.

Unfortunately I had to do what I didn’t want to do - a hole had to be cut in the chase.

The cable did punch up in the chase. The end got wedged between the wall and the stand pipe and just sort of coiled there.








Again, a cramped space, but my handy-dandy Multimaster came to the rescue! The hardest part was prying the piece of wood out.

There’s the sneaky little devil - the silver thing heading towards the tub.






This is a pic of it after I got it unstuck and heading for the hole. The fun was not yet over though.

Ah…there’s the serpent now!

Trust me - it wasn’t a fun job getting it to this point. I had to shove my arm, up to the elbow, and ‘feel’ for the cable. Once I had it I had to un-pry it from under the tub.

Once done I was able to get it to the point you see it at and then it snagged again.




This time the snag was in the attic, so I had to run up there and uncoil it, lay it out somewhat, and get it started again.

The whole bloody mess…

Now I just need to snake it into the basement.





Remember the part about snaking my arm up into the floor from ceiling? If you look at the floor you will see a bunch of fuzzy stuff. No, it is not the remains of some animal I found, but something much worse. It’s the old fiber glass insulation used back in the 50s through the 70s!!

AAARRRRGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!

As you all may remember, I’m somewhat sensitive to the pink stuff; just think what the old stuff did! I looked like a raspberry with all the red dots all over my arm. It didn’t stop there either - it went down my T-shirt which just happened to be wet with sweat.

I couldn’t wait to shower, but I needed to ‘buck-up’ and deal with it till the job was over.

One last thing - the round, grey thing is a 10 pound weight I used to help keep tension on the cable so it wouldn’t coil back up on me.

Here it is all cleaned up with the cable heading for the basement.

Now I can say “Bob’s my uncle” and call it a day.












Till next time…

Cheers!
Larry ~

4 comments:

Sandy said...

You have the patience of Job!

Larry said...

That - or I need a straight jacket!

Jennifer said...

Ohh... itchitchitchy! I hope the shower helped the itchy insulation! I'm very sensitive to that sort of thing, too!

Larry said...

Yup - the shower helped, but I still have a few red blotches.