So I just bought a house, it's about 50 years old and the home inspector had told us that there was some dodgy wiring in the basement. Some of it was pretty obvious. There were pony boxes all over the place in the basement. The previous owner had drilled holes in the wall to run extension cord out to the backyard. There were some scary splicing jobs that clearly weren't safe. To get insurance we have to have the service upgraded to 100 Amp from 60 so we're having the electrican clean up the garbage wiring while he's upgrading the service. He said it shouldn't take him more than two days, which is great.
I just got a call from him.
He had taken down a few ceiling tiles around the old breaker panel and said he had now seen the worst amatuer electrical work ever. Apparently half the circuits in the basement were rewired using whatever the guy around. And it seems that what he had laying around was bits of old lamp wiring, completely stripped and just wound together. So the electrician won't hook up our service to the grid until he can get all the nasty junk cleared (which is good actually, I don't want my house to burn down) so we won't have any hydro in the place expect in the kitchen (which was properly wired).
So I think the whole place is going to get rewired. It'll probably cost us way more than we had budgeted for. And my iMac died two weeks ago and I don't think I'll be able to get a new one atleast till we find out how much all the wiring will cost. I'm sure that if the wiring didn't suck arse it would be the plumbing we'd have to replace. Or we'd find out the previous owner insulated the place with dead cats.
So, does this kind of crap happen to all homeowners?
