Situation Normal: All Fudged Up

Seems like this project is going to be plagued with every possible problem before I can get it finished. When I last posted, We needed to put the toilet in and finish plumbing the drain on the sink. Well, the sink is done, and the toilet is in, but there's a problem. The toilet has some sort of leak in it. It's a slow leak that seem to be coming from the wax ring in the base.

Rob has tried tightening it, and it still hasn't fixed the problem, so our next fix will be lift the toilet, and redo the wax ring with a new one. "But that's not bad!" You would think so. There's more.

The electrical was all rough run, and I wired the switches, sockets, lights etc. Seems I should have done some more reading before I did this. Apparently, much to my embarrassment, I wired the wall switches in wrong. When I bought them, I just picked up the number I needed from the bulk bin. These were three way switches. Hence, I wired them wrong.

After we fixed this problem, we found that I had wired the GFCI plug in backwards. Sigh. Fixed that, and Voila! Power to the bathroom! Turn on the lights, and they worked! Turn on the fan, and it worked! Turn off the fan and... POP! The GFCI plug trips.

After an hour of checking the wiring and three grown men scratching their heads in puzzlement, We disconnected the fan from the circuit and left it for the night. I did some research the next morning and found this:

"The GFCI in the bathroom and Arc Fault detectors are only required by code for the receptacles. I would recommend against putting any lights on these circuits, especially the AFCI ones, as standard toggle light switches can arc a little when being turned off, causing the system to shut down... "

Ah ha! So all I need to do is wire the fan directly to a power source, and no need to run it off the GFCI. Ok, I can do that. But it's another delay.

The office was also checked for wiring mistakes. About half the plugs were put in the wrong way. While they would have worked, they would not have been the right polarity, possibly frying some electronic device plugged into them. We fixed that, and everything was ok.

So... I learned a valuable lesson, and had to eat a little crow.

The office is still on hold, and the bathroom is slowly being completed. The next part of the project will be to finish installing the shower. But.... as much as I hate to have multiple projects going, I need to start another. My roll away dishwasher finally gave up and died last week. I bought a new built in washer, and need to install it into my kitchen. I have the spot picked out, and everything is sort of ready to go, but again, it's a new project and I still have to finish the other two!

I hate washing dishes by hand even more, so this one will be placed as a priority. The highest point for the whole project is the office only has three things left: Paint, carpet, and a ceiling. As I'm using it to store materials for the other projects, I can't do anything in there until at least the shower is done.


Other than the project dragging still, life is pretty good. Work is busy, and satisfying. I'm still trying to get a steady girlfriend (I have one in mind, but she's awfully busy and hard to get a hold of!). About the only thing I can really say is I hope winter is over soon. I'm about sick of the cold.