Well, I got nice and itchy tonight. I hate working around the fiberglass insulation. I cut down a lot of the right side vapor barrier to get to some old outlets in there so that I can get them replaced by the ones I want to put in that are on the home theater circuit... While I had the vapor barrier down, I took out the insulation on half of that wall so that I could put in the boxes for the wall sconces... 3 on each side, centered between the rear 4 can lights that will go in the wood boxes that I made earlier and then up into the soffit.
I used the following for the wall sconces...
Anyway, I put those up and then put the insulation back and I am itchy! I also noticed that one of the outlets in the home theater area was on its own circuit (make that #11 in the "livable" space in the basement), and it had enough wire to be placed over near where the wet bar is going to have a circuit dedicated for the fridge and microwave. I figured, why not...
I did make a horrible error thought. Big enough that when I discovered that I had done something wrong, that I had that "pit in my stomach" feeling. In the background I had the TV show 'Holmes on Homes' playing, and they talked about junction boxes. Oh crap! I had followed code in SO many areas that I knew about, and asked about the things that I wasn't sure about. I talked to 2 different people about junction boxes, and they said that they were fine to use.
Fine to use? Sure... As long as you can still access them! Dang it!
I have 7 junction boxes for 7 of the 8 circuits that were set in the breaker panel in the basement. The previous home owner used the basement as a workshop, and had a bunch of individual sets of outlets spread out on the ceiling joists to plug stuff in to. I just got rid of the outlets, put in junction boxes, and ran more wire from there to the different zones in the basement. Seemed like an easy way to do it. Well, now I have to tear out the junction boxes, tear out the old wire from the breaker box to the junctions, and tear out the new wire that I ran from the junction boxes to the first outlet/switch/whatever in each zone. I then need to "home run" all of those circuits.
Probably a $100 mistake in wiring and a huge mistake in time.
Plus I will need to rethink how I can run my circuits. I have most of the boxes with just the one old wire coming in, and one new wire going out, but there are 2 of them with multiple wires coming out going to different parts of a zone. I guess that I will have to run them to an outlet with a deep box and make that my new "junction"...
I am so ticked off at myself. It makes complete sense now, but at the time when people said "just make sure that the connections are all tested before drywalled" I thought that I was good to go since I did test them.
Well, off to take a shower to get rid of the itching, and then I am off on a business trip in the morning. More work this coming weekend. I will feel a lot better once I fix the wiring, so maybe I will do that first. Won't appear to be much progress, but it will be work that needs to be done nonetheless...
