Electrical Inspection

Last Friday we had our electrical inspection. It went pretty well, actually. He took a quick look at everything and thought it looked fine. We had to move our junction boxes up a bit higher up in the attic space, since they were sitting on top of the studs and wouldn't be visible above the insulation we wanted to use. No problem there. We also had put some wires that were going into the bedroom into a box, which turned out not to be cool. So we cut a hole in the wall on the hallway side and put it in a box there, so hopefully that'll pass muster now. He had said we could either expose it by pushing the box out a half-inch, or we could use a mudring. We didn't really know what a mudring was, so we went to the local hardware store. A friend had previously explained it to me, but it turns out I wasn't getting it. Turns out a mudring is a metal plate that goes over the top of the box that brings it flush with the drywall, so you can mud (i.e., use joint compound) around the box and still access the wires in the box. Go figure.

The other thing we had to do was fix our outside light, over what used to be the side door and is now our front door. The inspector was very unhappy we hadn't fixed it yet. O_o Um, what? Anyway, we replaced the light (wires had been run from a box to the right of the door to a crappy, unprotected porcelain fixture above the door. $4 and 10 minutes after we finally started on it we had it fixed. Still, when had he told us we had to fix it? I thought it was weird my husband never told me about that, since he usually had a good memory and attention to detail. We chatted about it, and it turns out that neither of us were actually there for our initial electrical inspection (back when the new electrical service panel was put in), and it was the electrician that was present. The electrician had never told us about the porch light. Oh well.

So, we got permission to insulate, and then we have our second inspection. We were hoping to do that this week, but we won't get to, for reasons I'll outline in the next post.