Electric Shock Therapy

A lot of the work that has been going on recently was a backlog of work that was held up by the electrician. One freaking guy with way too much power.  No pun intended.  Let's just say that our contractor had a Come to Jesus meeting with him over his attitude towards being paid in full before he was done the work. He also stated after he really looked at the house that the price would be increasing by about 20%.  Wrong.  It would not be increasing, and you will not be paid in full, especially since this is a project on a draw schedule rather then an invoice type project.  After that meeting he still decided it was okay to come and go as he pleased.  A final warning was issued and other electricians were called to be on standby.  I guess that was the final warning that he needed.  Work is progressing nicely now.

Here is a look at what our electrical panel looked like before.  You are looking as fuses on a 40 amp service (I am pretty sure it was only 40 amps, which is so not sufficient for a house of this size!) for a 3 story house and 2 car garage.  The white box on the right are the original breakers from when the addition was built in 1916.  We are keeping this disconnected panel because it is such a cool feature.  I will try to get a picture of the inside soon.  I think the funniest part of this is the meter location.  Notice it was located above the left most fuse panel inside the house.  It was a new smart meter hung right over top of an antiquated fuse box.  All this junk is being moved in the great electrical upgrade of 2012.

The meter box is being relocated to the exterior corner of the kitchen out of the way from anything.  We also converted our aerial electrical service to underground.  That is that big black cable coming up from the meter pan.  It wasn't hooked up in the first picture.  When the power company came out to disconnect the service they said it is an absolute miracle that our house had not burned to the ground.  Where the service entered the house, the wires were totally stripped bare.  If it had touched the inside of the metal conduit that ran down the side of the house...poof.  No more house for us.  But that is all disconnected now, so we have removed that one risk.   We also converted everything to gas so that we are not burning through 1000 gallons of heating oil each winter.  That meter will be below the electric meter pan.

Once everything gets run into the house from the meter pan, it goes under the kitchen floor, through the crawl space and into the basement to the new circuit breaker box.  Look at the timber beams in the basement.  Those are actual trees with bark from the 1600's.  How cool is that!

The panel that they put in is large enough to accommodate additional circuits in the house.  We went for a 40 circuit panel.  Oh yeah!

So now, everything that has been run out of that panel above has to weave it way through walls, floors, closets, plaster and lathe.  Right now there are spaghetti strings of wires hanging all over the place while we wait for the work to be completed.  

Notice the nonexistent floor in the kitchen.  Still no floor!  I am pretty sure we will not be in the house for Amelia's first Christmas and birthday :(