That sucked.

Not getting that day back, either. redmed has posted her perspective too.

The only real success was that I added an outlet for the basement fridge, allowing me to reclaim an extension cord. Oh circuit 19, how sweet and beautifully simple you are!

Went after the basement lights, which were hacked together by a variety of aluminum, conduit, and fabric insulated crap. The plan was to replace that, piecewise, with nice new three conductor cable, run along crisp parallels which are pleasing to the obsessive compulsive eye. These all appeared to be on circuit 11, so I turned off that breaker, put some tunes on the wireless, and went to work. Circuit 11 is the one that carries a whole bunch of random crap, all over the house. I had some ill-formed plan of taking a subset of it and shifting it to some other circuit. Ha.

In pretty short order, pop-fizz, I jumped back from the live wire that I had just cut into. Gee, wow. That’s clearly not number 11. Go to the breaker box and see that 4 is thrown. Lovely. Someone decided to mix breakers within a junction box. Okay fine: This meant war. Ripped all the basement lighting related wires out of that box, sealed it back up, and labeled it “breaker 4, no ground!!!” That’ll show it.

Returned to the ripping and replacing …. and was led through the floor, up to the switch which controls the basement lights (it’s in the kitchen). Long story short: We fished the cable (tie the new one to the old one and pull through), except that it detached in the middle. There ensued about three hours of profanity, and (eventually) chiseling. It was great.

Got the wire replaced, rigged things back up, threw the switch aaaaaaand, nothing. Nada. Goose egg. Zilcho. At this point I thought: Hey, there’s a switch by the stairs to the basement. Maybe I could use that one instead! That turned out to be a bad scene, but only later on. So, I fought with the kitchen switch for a while. It’s some kind of psycho setup with four wires coming in, one of which is live … designed to switch two “appliances,” one of which is the whole basement. It was beyond my now-feeble-at eleven-at-night mind. I physically cut all connections to the basement and called it.

Went to investigate the stairway switch. Where does that wire go? How would I know. Here’s what I do know (one POP! later): The wire in that switch shorts out circuit 18 (master bathroom, thanks for asking). It has a really nifty property: It’s live only if the breaker for circuit 18 is OFF. Weird, right? Whatever. I taped over the hole and called it a night.

Oh yeah, plus I vacuumed the wood shavings off the furnace. The cable that we had to fish was right over it. That’s important.