electrical
jerry and dave came back for a couple of hours today to do some more work.
good news:
we now have an additional circuit for the upstairs. it's providing juice for an outlet in each of the bedrooms and one in the living room.
the "live wire" pictured earlier has been completely removed
the rube goldberg wiring in the garage has been fixed. all the crazy light fixtures and sockets have been removed, and a new circuit was run for the garage door opener. i can now operate the garage door with the lights off. woohoo!
there was an absolutely horrible run of telephone wire going all the way through the basement to the far bedroom. since we probably won't even bother to get a land line, i just ripped the whole damn thing out.
bad news:
the biggest fire hazard still hasn't been fixed. there's a receptacle in the dining room and a light socket downstairs from it in the laundry area. the outlet in the dining room is having intermittent problems, and the light socket downstairs isn't getting anything. last week i fiddled around with this for a few hours and got nowhere; today 2 seasoned electricians did the same exact thing, so now i don't feel quite so dumb. the wiring and insulation around that area are in good shape, and they checked and re-checked connections i don't know how many times.
they've traced the wire going the other direction and it goes somewhere above the ceiling in the semi-finished part of the basement. the current theory is that the cable got damaged somewhere up there when the drywall was put up. the only thing we can do now is yank down the ceiling (which i was going to do anyway) and trace that cable. so it looks like i'll be getting started on the basement destruction this coming week.