For now, however, I'd like to tell a story about how, despite all experience to the contrary, we can still occasionally be lulled into a false sense of complacency, and how nothing in this house is EVER easy.
For this particular story, I need to begin with - ironically enough - the sunroom. Better yet, we need to go all the way back to the last half of this old post, and the installation of the lights at the front of the garage for you to get the full idea...
Anyway, a few weeks ago (has it really been that long already? It has? Holy shnikies...), we were prepping the sunroom for the contractor to come and start fixing it. As usually happens, once we started taking things apart, we kept finding more things that needed to be fixed. When we opened up the wall beside the door on the greenhouse side of the sunroom, we found a light fixture near the top of the wall, and one of Frank's outdoor electrical specialties, the ever-popular "let's just run the electrical wire through an old, leaky piece of sprinkler pipe so we can get it out to the greenhouse" approach, near the bottom of the wall. While we were expecting the latter, what with previous experience and all, the former was a bit of a surprise in that, to all appearance, it seemed to be wired correctly.
Well, right up until we took a closer look at it, that is. Here's what the light looked like on the outside of the sunroom wall:
Funny thing about that (aside from the fact that it's attached to the wall with a BIG JESUS NAIL right through the fixture), is the apparent height of the mounting box. See, in that picture, the light is obviously mounted below the top of the sliding glass door. On the inside of the wall, however, the wire that was obviously supplying electricity to the fixture went through a small hole well above the top of the glass door. As we looked back and forth between the two sides of the wall, it became clear that the extraneous piece of wood on the outside of the wall was hiding... something we probably didn't want to see.
Of course, we first had to take a closer look at the fixture, and the weird and wonderful ways Frank found to attach things to ... other things. This picture shows the brass nut on one side of the fixture (which was the wrong fastener, btw - you can clearly see that it wouldn't screw down onto the bolt far enough to keep the fixture tight to the wall) and the nail someone drove right through the fixture - presumably to hold it to the board that's keeping the whole thing from being flush with the wall. Oh, and notice that the nut on the other side of the fixture did not match the one on this side... which you can only see because the light wasn't mounted at the right angle.
But wait! It gets worse!
No, really. It get worse. This is what it looked like after we took the light off the mounting bracket:
And this is what we found behind the board nailed to the wall:
Um... yeah. That IS speaker wire. I mean, it's an exterior light - it's not like anyone is ever going to CHECK it.
Anyway, as Bill Cosby might say, I told you that story so I could tell you another one.
The point of all this is that, after the lights on the front of the garage, and the light on the side of the sunroom, we felt pretty confident that we could handle pretty much anything in terms of the electrical stuff going on in this house. So when it came time to do something about the motion sensor light on the side of the garage, we went into the project expecting the worst. Which of course, is not at all what we found...
The underlying issue with the light on the side of the garage is that it... well, didn't actually work. We knew the motion sensor part of it was at least registering movement because every now and again, I'd hear it click as I walked past it. The lights, on the other hand, remained stubbornly dark.But it seemed like a logical place for a motion sensor light, and with the days getting shorter, we figured it might not be a bad idea to at least see if we could get it working.
Well, the first thing I noticed was that both of the bulbs seemed to be loose. Like, probably not actually burnt out, just not screwed in tight enough. But I took them out anyway to get a closer look at the light. It SEEMED to be in pretty good working order, and I was testing the range of the motion sensor arm to try and aim it down towards the walkway when it snapped right off in my hand. I guess the plastic was a little brittle from being exposed to the elements for so long, but still. With repurposing the light now out of the question, I took off the rest of the light and found, to my utter shock and ever-lasting surprise, a properly wired light fixture with a pancake box set into the stucco and fastened securely to the plywood backing board behind it. The wire that fed the box wasn't pinched in the hole, it wasn't SPEAKER wire, and in fact, seemed to have been installed by a qualified electrician. "Will wonders never cease?" I thought. "Just when you think you have this house figured out, they throw something done RIGHT at me. Shame I had to break the damn thing, eh?"
Anyway, off we hied to Crappy Tire and bought ourselves a new light fixture. Daylight sensor, adjustable motion range and light duration, the works. We brought it back, unpacked it, and the War Department went up the ladder and wired it up. Once she was done, I went up and carefully attached it to the mounting box. I tightened up the screw so it was good and snug, popped in a couple of bulbs, and Amy flipped the breaker.
POP!
"Huh," she said. "I've never seen blue flame shoot out of the top of an electrical panel like that."
So, yeah. Turns out that the pancake boxes are somewhat problematic in that when you have a long mounting screw right in the center of the fixture (as we did), it tends to line up directly with the wires being fed into the box from behind. Okay, so we need a new box. And, as it turns out, more wire. It seems that when they wired the original pancake box, they didn't leave any extra in the wall in case this sort of thing happened. Luckily for us, the wire was easy enough to trace because they had actually fed the wire out into the garage, and run it down the face of the drywall rather than inside the wall cavity.
So, to fix MY mistake, we had to retrace the wire back to the outlet set in the wall of the garage;
- Open up the drywall at the socket box on the inside of the garage.
- Feed the wire up through the inside wall cavity to the light fixture.
- Drill a 4.5" hole in the plywood backing.
- Cut open the drywall in the garage to access the back of the box.
- Rewire both the outlet and the new box.
- CAREFULLY reattach the light.
Oh, and of course, we didn't have enough wire OR a spare outlet box, so there was (yet) another trip to Home Despot in there somewhere, too.
Looks pretty good, now, though:
The moral of the story?
Oh, jebus. I don't know. We don't do morals much around here. Swearing, though - THAT we got covered.
