Day 860

I woke up at 8 and went back to sleep until 8:30.  I'm beginning to like doing that.  Then I got up, did pet stuff and had breakfast.  After that it was out to the garage to finish up the wiring.

Before I did the wiring I decided to finish up putting the wheels on the bathroom door. I drilled the other two holes and bolted the wheels on.  Unfortunately the washers I bought didn't take up all of the extra length in the bolts.  I'm going to have to buy more.

I started out the wiring with the "easy" box.  It would have been easy if I hadn't been a dumbshit and cut the wires too short.  They barely reached, which made hooking up the outlet difficult.  I think it took almost an hour to do that.

Then I tackled the main box.  It had 4 wires coming into a single gang box with an outlet.  Needless to say it was tight.  It took awhile to get everything connected, but it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be.  When that was done I went around and plugged all of the lights back in.  I used wire ties to hold up the cords so that they looked better.  Then I turned everything on...

Damn, on of the boxes didn't work.  It was a little after noon and I was tired and had a bad headache.  So I went into lunch.  After lunch I just couldn't face doing anymore work on the lights.  My head hurt bad, so I sat down in the recliner and took a nap.  When I woke up I surfed until it was time to take the dog to the mailbox.

I stopped at the garage to get my sweatshirt.  Then I decided to take a look at the lights.  I used a meter to verify that the old wire in the conduit was OK.  That told me that the black wire wasn't connected.  I took the wire nut off (it connects 5 wires) and redid it.  It worked fine.  Then I pushed it back into the box and buttoned everything up.  The box didn't work.

I repeated this process at least 4 times.  Each time everything would work until I pushed the wires into the box.  I got really frustrated.  I also got tired going up and down the ladder 40 times or more.  Finally I took my glasses off so that I could really see how the wires were going into the wire nut.  That's when I saw it.  The wire that went to the problem box had a nick in the insulation about two inches from the end.  It was probably put there by the sharp end of the ground wire that was connected to the outlet.  I llmached down that end and put some tape around the nick.  That took care of the problem.

This whole effort took about an hour and a half.  When it was done I cleaned up and put everything away.  I swear the lights are brighter than they were before.

Dinner was left over beans and rice.  After dinner was TV and reading.