Sunday night update - 2nd electrical inspection tomorrow

Argh. It's 10 PM and I just took a shower. One of these days it's going to be nice to not expect a muddy runoff down the shower drain.

Anyway, we've been working on the 3rd floor most of the day today. Mainly we've been furring and framing in the storage area, getting it ready for the spray foam insulation, and building a new partition wall so that we don't need to have an electric outlet on it, but wth, we're putting one in anyway. I'll get a picture soon and update.

Why all the fuss? Well, we're having the second electrical inspection tomorrow. The good news is that when we were trying to figure out whether we really needed an outlet along this 6' wall, we talked to Sheila Spradling at NKAPC, and she waived the fee for the re-inspection. Very cool lady there.

So we put in a bunch of new outlets (five to be exact), rewired another smoke detector on the 3rd floor (a full 12 feet from the one at the bottom of the stairs--harumphf) moved some light boxes and a wall.

Heck, at least I got all of the gunk out of my hair in the shower. If I knock my head on an attic joist one more time I'm gonna scream. If I knock my head into another NAIL in an attic joist I'm gonna scream bloody murder.

I'm tired. And we haven't had dinner yet. I need a glass of wine.

Wish us luck.

Aw crap. Failed the Electric Inspection.

And we worked so hard, too.

I don't think Bob from the NKAPC even looked at the jbox wiring or the connections, which is where I figured they'd be focusing on. Noooo. We lost it on NOT HAVING ENOUGH OUTLETS.

Apparently we missed that part where any wall that is 6 foot or greater must have an outlet. So the wall that covers over the fireplace in the kitchen (which isn't 6" but was close, and is 42" away from the island, which will have 2 outlets) needs one. And the knee wall on the second floor stairs in the office. And the fireplace in the office. And the third floor? Three more. (Two in areas that may never be even reached).

The breaker boxes were replaced and look GREAT if I do say so myself. I thought that would be the most excruciating part of the inspection. After all, it was the hardest. (For me anyway.)

I mentioned before that we wanted to move them from the basement (where they were split into two boxes for the two apartments in the house) into the first floor dining room. Here's where we started:












And here is what we ended up with. I think we should've scored points just for cleaning the darned thing up, y'know?

But that wasn't all. Noooo. There's this code that says we can't just ground the house by connecting the grounds to the copper plumbing pipe and the 10' copper rod embedded under the basement. No, we need a SECOND 10' copper rod embedded into the foundation six feet away from the first one. Sheesh.

The guy gave us our NKAPC sheet with the list of needed outlets and the grounding rod, then checked the part where it said did not pass, needs re-inspection. He also checked the part where we now need to pay a re-inspection fee. I think it's like $30-$50

So it'll take another day to order the NEW (6%$#@*&) copper grounding pipe and dig a hole into the foundation, and run new wires for the six *^&%$#@&^%$* outlets that will never be used, but just in case someone 30 years down the road wants to plug in a vacuum cleaner in a crawl space in the third floor attic, they'll be able to.

Moo. I'm the new cash cow.