Uh Oh, It's Magic

There it is, my 2:48am Victory Festbier to celebrate the painting of the kitchen. The first coat anyway. Given that i didn't really start until 10pm, and had to do a little sanding and all the cutting first, a 2:30 finish isn't too bad.

As you can see, it's a pretty dramatic change from the terra cotta walls of yore. We went with a Martha Stewart (shudder) paint called Heavy Goose for both the new room and the kitchen, which has engendered lots of jokes. Where do they come up with these names? What is it, exactly, about this particular shade of wintry white that made Martha think of some fat feathery fowl? Maybe she was making foie gras that day.

I'll do a proper photoshoot when it's all done, which you should expect sometime in 2012.

And now, the bad news:


Last weekend, I finished painting the new room, and was putting in the trim for the recessed lights when I discovered to my horror that only half of them work - the ones now dangling on the left side above. The right side doesn't work at all. First, I tried to troubleshoot: different bulbs, checking the connecting wires inside, etc. Nothing was wrong. I spent some time on the web and read a suggestion that a neutral wire was probably not connected somewhere, which made sense, although it had passed inspection and I had been very diligent about the connections, but thought maybe the drywall guys had inadvertently knocked something loose. The problem is that now that the ceiling is finished, searching for the loose connection meant ripping open holes to find it. So I did the logical thing and put my head down on the counter and wept bitterly.

Once I got my wits back together, I came back to the lights with dogged determination and the electric tester and found that all the boxes were getting power, so it likely wasn't a missing neutral connection. But mysteriously, not only are the hot (black) wires hot, but all the neutral (white) wires in the nonworking lights are also hot, whereas the working side are properly hot and neutral. This is bad, obviously. It's also really a mystery, because i wired all the boxes in a line, so i have no earthly idea how half of them would be in a different electrical state; maybe I had accidentally screwed up the wiring in the box somewhere. I consulted my wiring book and learned to my great relief that wiring in recessed boxes can actually be fixed from the hole- you just remove the shield that holds the trim and there is an access panel that can be opened from inside the box (a good idea). I was beginning to rue our decision to go with the 3" lights as i searched for a screwdriver short enough to fit in there, and once the trim pieces were out, it was still fortunate that i have such small hands, as getting those plates off the inside required squeezing your hand and wrist in there and feeling around for the latch, because there's not enough room for your hand and your eyes. There's a market for women electricians here, for sure.

Sadly, almost, my wiring was perfect. The fixture connections were fine, too. So no obvious solution exists. I thought about the switches and took all of those out to see if something had happened on that end - our electrician had actually done the switches and half of the wiring (including running power to the switch boxes and the last switch leg for the run), so I thought perhaps he had wired them incorrectly. They're on a 4-way switch, which is sadly not as kinky or fun as it sounds, but is definitely as complicated to organize. (Also, like all things relating to construction it makes no sense - a 4-way switch means you have 3 switches controlling one light/set of lights. A 3-way switch is actually two switches. A 2 x 4 piece of lumber is actually 1.75 x 3.75, the 2 x 2 mosaic tile is actually 1.85 x 1.85. Etc., etc.) Anyway, I pulled all the switches out and realized quickly that I have no clue what is happening in those switch boxes. Was it the traveler or the common...or the power in? I couldn't tell from the tangle before me. I am not, it turns out, an electrician.

These kinds of wiring fiascos (and I've had several in this project) remind me of a story my mother told me about the electrical engineers she went to architectural school with, who, when discussing radio frequencies and how they work joked that what FM really stands for is "Fucking Magic."

I am calling the magician.

[PS - I think this diagram sums up my experience pretty well.]