I don’t know about you, but I get songs stuck in my head pretty quickly and easily. Fortunately for me (and unfortunately for everyone around me), I have a new song for each home renovation project. I’ll share those along the way, but while we were working with our electricians, “Electric Boogie” (ala Electric Slide) would not stop playing over and over in my head.
You’re welcome! Now, onto to the updates.
The update that had the highest priority for me was electrical work. Not only was the attic insulation in shreds due to a prior rodent infestation, but the outdated knob and tube wiring was doom and gloom. The last thing we needed for our brand new mid-century mod home was to go up in flames. So, attic insulation was ripped out and the electricians thanked us for that!
The upstairs of our house wasn’t updated, but the wiring in the basement was already redone, so we had a mess. Here’s a list of things we had done:
- New 100 amp panel
- complete rewiring of the entire upstairs, adjoining to the redone wiring in the basement
- Updates to the wiring to the water heater
- New meter from Seattle City Light
- New outlets in quite a few rooms (some of our bedroom had super dead outlets or an outlet in the middle of a wall instead of at the bottom)
- Grounded outlets in the bathroom and kitchen
- Rewiring the dishwasher
- Wire to the new canned lights (we installed them, they wired them)
It was your basic rewiring job, although we learned three key lessons
- Having the attic insulation out of the attic sped up the process a ton! It isn’t always a possibility, but I highly recommend it.
- If you want to install canned lighting, you can do a majority of it yourself – just time it with the electrician and the rewire. Cutting drywall is fun, folks! (And you don’t want to know how many LED lightbulbs D and I bought at Costco.)
- If you have smarthome or automated electrical panels (like Insteon or similar brands), make sure that you understand that the full set of wiring needs to run to the lightswitch, not stay up in the attic. We brought all of our smarthome equipment to Seattle with us, and now we can’t use it. (Does anyone want it?)
All in all, it’s a relief to have it done and to not be able to blow a fuse when I was using a hairdryer and we were running the dishwasher. Ah, modern technology.
It’s electric! (Boogie-woogie-woogie!)
