Demolition Continues...

I spent some time this weekend continuing demo. There was a very nasty bathroom in the back corner of the expansion space that had to come out. I didn't get any photos from the start, but this is after the hot water heater and associated piping/electrical was demo'd, as well as the light and fan, and light switch. I also had the sink out and the drywall down prior to getting photos.
(click on it to enlarge)



I spent about four or five hours tracing electrical circuits Friday and Saturday. There are three 100 amp panels, and two of them are a mess (in the expansion space). I found four places where electrical wires were hanging out of the ceiling, exposed and energized. The circuits were all cannibalized, meaning someone had gone in over the years and added electrical outlets and fixtures, and just tapped into whatever electrical circuit was convenient. I spent hours tearing out unneeded and unsafe electrical circuits. Some just had to come out at the nearest juction box. Others had to come out all the way back to the panel. Some I just did a partial demo and left it safed off in a juction box where a future wall will go. It will then be easy to run a series of outlets down into the kid's room. I also found numerous receps installed with the polarity reversed. It is not a big deal for most things, but can cause problems with TV's and other equipment. I will be replacing all of the receps with new and will fix all of the polarity issues later. I even found some circiuts tapped into commercial flourescent light fixtures that had to come out. What a mess... Here is a photo of some of the work (click on it to enlarge):
As you can see in the first photo, there is a box with 8 receptacles in it on a long, flexible whip. As it turns out, the receps in the whip are fed from a different circuit than the receps in the outlet box it is attached to. Our office will be at this location, so I am getting rid of the whip with 8 outlets and replacing it with a short conduit run and a box with four outlets. Since this will be inside the office, I am not concerned about the conduit showing.



The expansion space, as you can see from some of the photos, is an absolute mess. The walls are stained with shoe polish, as well as the ceilings. It was a shoe repair shop for decades and they applied polish with a motorized buffer wheel. From the looks of things, they may have applied liquid polish with a five gallon bucket!! It would seem that they never cleaned the place once in 35 years. Now it's up to me to change it from a total disaster into a nice space.