What is this? (part 2)

Here's a picture of the inside of the curious outlet I described in my previous post. Notable are the weight of the wiring, somewhere around 12 gauge, and that the wiring is in a box.

There are two of these outlets, one in the dining room and one in the front hallway.

Any new thoughts?

What is this?

Help! I've a few of these. I had assumed that they were old phone jacks, but then I noticed that they had five leads...

Light switches and electrical outlets

Virtually all of the electrical outlets and perhaps half of the light switches in my house are original. I find it curious that while the 1920s light switches all still have excellent action, virtually all of the outlets are so worn that a plug will barely sit in them. Did someone underspec the electrical outlets when the house was built? I can't imagine that many switchless items were used, and anyway, the deterioration of the outlets is too consistent - even those in underused areas don't want to hold a plug. Are electrical plugs thinner today than they used to be?

What am I going to do with this stupid little window?

At least that's what I had thought before. It's in the basement, in a small room that houses the sump pump. The room is about 4' x 7'. It sticks out away from the basic rectangle of the foundation, so all four walls, the ceiling and the floor are masonry.



It is actually underneath the front porch, following about the same outline as the porch itself. I'm not sure why they felt the need to do an excavated foundation for this space.



The sump pump sits in the corner of the space opposite the window, which is near the ceiling.

Initially, I thought that the space was relatively useless. It's small, cold, and humid. The ceiling in shorter than the rest of the basement. At one point I called it our "wine cellar". One should note that I have no idea if the temperature and humidity levels are appropriate for the storage of wine. One should also note that while I like the idea of a wine cellar, I've never owned more than seven bottles of wine at a time, and that presently, I have but three.

I've been interested in gardening for a while, and before I realized how affordable Shaker Heights could be, I was looking to purchase a farm. We had planned to have a small vegetable garden in our current yard. With the current economic situation, we were looking harder at how to stretch our money. As a result, we will be trying to figure out how to make more of our yard a garden while still keeping it looking clean and yardlike, at least until we get an impression of how the neighbors feel about it. Also, we will likely be joining some sort of Community Supported Agriculture group (CSA), which should provide a steady supply of fresh vegetables.

This otherwise useless room in the basement should be an excellent root cellar. With masonry walls on all sides and earth to insulate it on three of the four walls, it should keep vegetables all winter long. Building shelving to fit in the space will use up some of the scrap lumber that I have sitting around. Further, that window that I started this entry with - it'll be the perfect location to route the necessary ventilation pipes through.

Love is blindness

This is part of the wiring for the water pumps for the hot water heat system. There are two pumps, each with its own Federal Pacific switch. There's a low-voltage transformer, and two boxes made by Honeywell of unknown utility. I should take a look at them later to determine exactly what they are for. There's a lot of stuff down there that I'm not quite sure what it's for. I don't need the extra space, so I'm not actively pursuing this issue.

Do you see the problem here? I'm not quite sure how I didn't see it before. It's not the Federal Pacific switches - they were made before the quality of the company's products went downhill. Follow the low-voltage wiring for the pumps up. Yeah. Wire connectors just sitting out there in the open, outside a box.

They're only low-voltage, and they're in a place that is not likely to be filled with combustibles anytime soon, but still I should address that. One more thing for the list, I guess.

The Original Shower Light Fixture of Doom!

(Not to be confused with the Electrical Outlet of Death™)



This was the light fixture in the shower. It is original to the house. We just removed it to replace it with a code-complaint fixture. Note the lack of mounting screws. Yes, it's held on by magic. Removing it intact was a challenge - after all, it is easy to remove things properly when you can find the hardware, but when you can't find the hardware to unscrew them...



It was held onto a mounting bracket by the two screws in the base of the socket. While this seems a slightly disconcerting way to attach it, the base and socket are as solid as ever at 85+ years old, so clearly it hasn't been a structural problem.



The fixture sat on this base, which would really look much better if not for the layers of paint and popcorn. I'm not terribly fond of the base, preferring the clean lines of the fixture without it, but I assume that it helps to prevent moisture infiltration.



This is the underside of the fixture. Note that other than the two screws, it is completely sealed. With a bit of caulk, it could probably be completely sealed.



This is the rest of the light fixture, which the base screwed into. The strap ran between two joists to support it. The electrical connection was not made in the ceiling box, which is too small to fit much of anything, but rather in the extensive free air space above it, as was common at the time.



Finally, here is the fixture after I cleaned it up. Again, I'm really quite pleased with its clean lines. I love the lack of visible hardware, and am actively looking for more fixtures like it. I wonder if a shade clipped onto it, or if that was just the style.

The Electrical Outlet of Death™ is at the edge of the sink in the non-master bathroom, which, conveniently, is also the edge of the shower. An electrical outlet in a shower doesn't seem like a very good idea to me. When we eventually upgrade our electrical system, I'm going to put a GFCI breaker on that circuit so I don't have to replace the gorgeous original outlet cover with a hideous GFCI one.

We now have a boring flush-mounted shower light!

One of the code violations that the city required us to fix was the bare bulb fixture in the shower. I removed the fixture and replaced it with a flush mounted one, as per code. We had planned to replace it, just like we had planned to replace the Electrical Socket of Death™. However, once we had removed the fixture, we saw its charms and wanted to reconsider its removal. By that point, the entire ceiling in the shower had been removed and the light fixture removed, so I decided to just install the damn can on the ceiling.

The first can that I had purchased, the one with the better looking piece of glass, of course did not fit in the space, due to vertical clearance issues. While the idea of notching a load-bearing joist was quite tempting (half the width of the joist isn't too much, is it?), I decided to find another fixture. The replacement fixture was smaller, in addition to being shorter. It's not quite as nice as the first one we found, but it's a lot less ugly than many of them (no polished chrome trim rings!) and it does the job. Further, to get something that looked slightly better, I'd have had to pay at least five times as much and special order the part. While I'm not completely satisfied with the look of the glass in the fixture, that should be simple enough to replace if I really want to, in the future.