Untangling

After a long day out in the hot sun yesterday, Noel decided to do some inside work today, so he undertook the de-jackassing of the wiring in the basement. You will recall that our idiotic first contractor made a mess of our nice wiring during the foundation replacement, and part of closing out the foundation permit is fixing the hash he made of the wiring.

For example, you may notice that two of these wires are not like the others. Our basement is not conditioned space, and wiring going through it is supposed to be the metal-clad cable like the other, compliant wiring.

And two of those wires go here, to this open box (this is how that idiot left it, completely open, even though boxes like this are supposed to have covers on them).

This started out as a set of four home-runs, from the various circuits to the breaker panel. Instead of properly shortening those home runs when the breaker box moved, that douchebag just cut the ends (with whatever he had, since they were a mess on the ends), and stuffed them into this box. Because god forbid he should not totally jack up a really nice clean wiring job.

(As a side note, that guy always claimed the wiring had been done by another contractor, but the name he gave us was not a licensed electrician in California; in fact we could not ever verify that the guy even existed at all.)

There's a reason we use that contractor's name as a synonym for destroying nice things.

Another nice code violation: A great way to install blocking is to just mash whatever wiring you come across completely flat with a piece of wood. That's not ever going to be a problem, is it? I mean, not unless that mashed wire has a short and burns your house to the ground, of course. This is the kind of reckless disregard for his clients and their homes that characterizes that jackass.

You may think I sound a little angry. While Noel was down in the basement doing this I was harvesting the last of our cherries and making maraschino cherries to enjoy for the rest of the year. Every now and then he had to come upstairs and just not look at this mess to calm down. We cannot get rid of that moron's incompetent and dangerous messes soon enough.

At the end of the day, we had a rewired box (we're still discussing how to put back those home runs and make this not be such a mess). With a proper cover, even.

And two of the three incorrect wires were replaced. We're not ready to call for the final inspection on the foundation permit (we'll probably combine that with an inspection on the rough plumbing and wiring for the bathrooms), but we're pretty close. One last little touch will be redoing the labels for the circuits so they are legible, since it seems like not only does every contractor in the world have illiterate levels of bad handwriting, but they all want to hand-label things instead of using a label maker.

posted by ayse on 06/17/12