Saturday, July 31, 2004

Slow day today

(Originally posted on Saturday, July 31, 2004 by Cathy)

Well, it's coming up on noon here, and so far all I've accomplished is getting the fluorescent lamps on the medicine cabinet to light again. I wanted to keep the old fixture, at least until we redo the whole bathroom, since it's really sort of cool (in a retro weird sort of way). Anyway, we pulled it out and disconnected it from the old knob and tube wiring, somehow neglecting to note which wire was connected to which. (Of course, since knob and tube used black for both the neutral and hot, my confusion is somewhat understandable.) So we found ourselves faced with a white wire, a black wire, and two yellow wires at the top of the medicine cabinet, with not much indication of where they went, except that everything but one yellow went to one side.

Tried connecting the two yellows together (since there was one from one side, why not?), tried connecting the yellows (one or both) to the hot, nada. (Well, I did trip the GFCI a couple times by shorting hot to ground while trying to measure voltage and connectivity, of course...) Finally, I thought that maybe (stupidly enough) the yellows were actually neutrals too. Bingo. It's lighting happily again. Slowly, but happily. :)

That pretty much does it for the bathroom (until we remodel/replumb). Tim did a third coat of paint on the patch on the ceiling, so we're about set there. Now we've just got to get up the energy to go finish the demolition in the kitchen. I'm eating the last of the dengaku as I type this, so we're gonna be pretty hungry tonight if we don't have at least one countertop that isn't covered with tools, sawdust, and plaster dust.

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