Don't you hate it when...

Hello all. With homage to these old SNL skits, as we've mentioned a few times already, renovation projects have a way of surprising you. The most common surprise is a seemingly simple job becoming an involved one. 

Case in point we took a break from some bigger projects to instal new lights in the downstairs bathrooms. Maybe a half hour to knock these out, that's what we thought. Shut off the circuit, remove the fixture, attach the wiring, and install the new light. Piece of cake.

Unlike the pantry, this was a case of the builders underdoing the work. We started with a very unassuming and fairly typical bathroom fixture.

After removing the bulbs, there were collars around each of the three sockets that held the silver/gold face plate in place. Removing those exposed the backbone of the fixture.

Our surprise came when we unscrewed the black face plate from the wall to discover that, contrary to any building code for at least the past fifty years there was no electrical box through which the wire fed and to which the fixture attached. We literally had a wire sticking out of a crude hole in the wall.

Aside from safety, the main reason for installing electrical boxes is to allow for easier replacement of a fixture. The bathrooms were set up to keep the original fixtures forever.

This required a visit to the local hardware store (much smaller but also much closer than the big box stores) to find a box we could install. We had a pretty small space to work with. There's a 2x4 to the left of the opening and that white pipe is the drain from the upstairs bathroom. Fortunately there now are many types of boxes of different sizes, shapes, and depths. This one is about half the depth of a typical box, which allowed it to sit in front of the drain pipe.

With the box in place we could go back to installing a light as normal. This will get sconces after we prep and paint the walls (easier to work around). Fortunately the wall plate even covered up most of the drywall repair we had to do.

Until next time.