26 June 2026

Chores and Electrical Excitement

After a couple of days of fishing this week, I thought it was time to get on with more of the deferred maintenance around this joint. One of the things I've been putting of is re-stocking the firewood in the basement from the sub-garage.

I started by coating the pertinent basement wall with a moisture barrier paint, something that's been on the list for four years. I used up a gallon of the paint, then measured the square footage of the completed painting, and how much wall remains to be painted. Now I know that I'll need a five gallon bucket to finish up the balance of the basement walls ... AND I can proceed with more splitting and stacking.

With that side-job done, I proceeded to the next side job, which was cleaning up the sub-garage - put all the tools in their homes, and ensure enough clear floor space for splitting, and using the dolly to haul wood into the basement. That only took a couple of hours, but there was a problem.

During a bit of preparation for future work, I was checking an electrical box to see what was what there (in hopes of being able to route more power into the sub-garage at need ... when I opened the box, I saw all the grounds were loose. Hmmm. That's not great. But I touched one, and got a shock. But no blown breaker, and the electricity to the lights was working. Um, what?

I closed the box up to reduce risk to myself while I looked into the issue. Saw a spark to nearby metal while I did so, and decided it was worth measuring.

I dug out the multimeter, and set it to AC, and probed between the electrical box and nearby metal...

Yup, the electrical box was fully energized. Sigh.

I have a piece of Klein gear that permits me to plug in to a circuit, and then identify (with certainty) the breaker controlling the circuit. I used that to confirm that the correctly labeled breaker was indeed the one to switch off. I did that, then started doing exploratory work in the boxes in the sub-garage.

Already too long a story, it turns out that whoever the prior homeowner "hired" to put that light in the sub-garage had not terminated the ground wire on the box or the ground screw on the switch, but on the alternate hot lead screw on the switch itself. That was an easy fix. Back in the ceiling box without the grounds attached to each other, there was another issue, although not as serious. The Romex (residental AC wire) to the lights was too short for the run, and while I could have made it work, it really wasn't able to be installed correctly. Since I had a spool of 14/2 Romex laying about, I removed the old run from the box to the lights, and re-wired it with sufficient length to correctly terminate it at both ends. Job done, I re-checked the circuit, confirmed that the electrical box was not energized anymore, and that the circuit was correctly wired and operating properly.

Now ... when do I go through the rest of the house, and check the wiring in all the rest of the boxes I can access? I'll bet you some amount of money that I'll find other issues. But not this week.

Thereafter I've been spending 2-3 hours a day splitting, transporting, and stacking the firewood into the basement. I'm about halfway done with that. I'm not in a rush, so I'm not over-doing it, in any given day.

Yes, I buy firewood, and yes, some of it (okay, about half of it, generally) needs further splitting. The wood stove I've got is a Jötul 118, which is deep, (about 2') but with a small door, which makes it difficult to put large pieces of firewood in.

I should be able to finish that up within the next week, certainly before I get the next two cords of firewood delivered and needing to be stacked into the sub-garage.