Day 6 – Electric

Man, was Thurs. a long day…. my electrician friend, Craig, made it to the house despite the pending 4-8″ snow storm and we finished things up by 4 pm so he was out of here at a reasonable time. The day consisted of cutting a lot of bx, making a lot of holes, and connecting a bunch of wires. At the end of it, we had all the lights working according to plan and the outlets were live. I learned a few new tricks along the way:

  • I installed my first breaker into a panel.  The big thing was to make sure the breaker was set to the off position before I put it in. Other than that, it was pretty simple so I feel pretty confident that if I needed to add another one in the future, I’d be capable of doing it.
  • In the midwest, the ground always goes to the right when installing an outlet. There is no code that dictates this, but it is a regional thing. Weird.
  • Don’t run the circuit though an outlet (using both screws to pass the electricity to the next leg in the circuit). It’s better, and safer, to create a pigtail to tie in the outlet. If the outlet is ever damaged, it w0n’t impact anything else that is ‘down stream’ to the outlet.
  • Prepping outlet boxes for the drywall saves a lot of time down the road. Get your cables in shape and setup properly. It’s worth it.
  • Ripping out 30-40 feet of old BX that was run through the ceiling joists is a royal pain in the rear and takes a lot longer than you think.

Oh, and I also got made fun of because of the size of my lineman’s pliers. Craig asked if Maddie or Brooke let me borrow their tools for the project… Nice. Add that to my tools-to-purchase list.

After Craig left I started to really think about the drywall and started to freak out a little. I had planned on starting drywall today (Day 7), but I still didn’t have a lot of things figured out and I wasn’t ready. I needed to finish the 1.5″ PVC run, insulate and great-stuff all around, take care of the soundproofing, finish all the speaker cable runs, and more before I was ready for drywall.

Day 7 – Ceiling and wall prep

I stayed up late last night to plan out the next big steps and realized this morning, after snow blowing, that I needed to spend the day doing other, non-drywall related tasks to prepare. We called Julie’s dad and told him what was going on so we pretty much cancelled the planned day. They did come over, but only for a few hours. Still very appreciated…

We got the weatherproofing/insulation completed as well as the soundproofing today. The room is prepped and a friend came over tonight and helped me carry all the drywall into the basement (BIG THANKS). I setup the drywall lift (which I am SOOOO excited to use) and we are now ready to start hanging rock tomorrow. We ended up going with Roxul over most of the basement. Depot carries it now and as soon as we put it up, it was obvious that the sound in the room changed. It was quieter with very little echo. Hopefully this means with the 5/8″ sheetrock, it will keep out most of the noise.

I also ran 110′ of speaker cable for the future home theater. You can see the speaker cables hanging in the picture above and you can see all of the cables feed into a 4″ electric box in the picture below. Looks a little crazy, but heh, now is the time to do it. Oh, and if you count the hanging wires, you’ll notice I setup the room for 7.1… if we ever wanted to go that way.