Wiring up the house

The last two weeks the electrician has been busy wiring up the house. So there’s now a lot of conduit (soft plastic tubes) being run, crisscrossing the entire house. It looks more chaotic than ever.

One side of each wall has already been drywalled, but the other is open for easy access, including most of the ceilings. When everything has been wired up correctly, everything will then be drywalled (expected this week or the next).

Of course, most of the wiring it has to end up somewhere near the wiring cabinet, which looks awfully messy right now. But I’ve seen (in another house) how neat and tidy the cabinet looks like when done, so I’m not worried.

In some central locations we need a lot of light-switches. These four is for controlling the kitchen and hallway. And there’s three more boxes on the other side of the entrance to the kitchen.

Here we can see that we are going to have outlets installed near the outer beams in the living room. The roof-frames prevents us from placing them dead center above each beam. We are planning to have dimmable spotlights shining upwards on the ceiling high above the living room, creating a sky-effect of sorts. Or so I hope.

The hole near the middle beam is for the exterior lights, I think, and will probably be more or less invisible from the inside.

The next picture shows the second floor ceiling being wired. Some of the conduit is for the upstairs TV-outlet; there is a "TV-network” being run from each TV-location terminating in the attic, so we have the possibility of distributing a satellite TV-signal from the attic, for example.

One can see see some of the cabling going up to the attic through the insulation (near the guy’s elbow).

This also includes a parallel run of empty conduit. Bert from Sesame Street would ask us why on earth anyone would want empty conduit, and Ernie might say it would be great for when it starts to rain candy instead of water... or was that an empty box?

In reality it’s for the possibility of installing, say, a small data network, if we feel the need later.

However, we expect to mainly use a wireless network. We use one at home today, which works great. It would’ve been quite expensive to fully network the house, and since we could get really fancy with wireless equipment without coming close to that sum, we cut that out (leaving only the empty conduit as a backup).