Major Project: Kitchen Electrical Work

In taking out the wall between the kitchen and dining room, we decided that we should put in some lights over the area that would be the bar.

The first task was finishing off some of those electrical wires hanging from the ceiling that were previously in the wall.

Next we moved an outlet from the middle wall (that wasn't there anymore) to the side wall between the dining room & kitchen.

The final piece was adding 3 recessed lighting areas over the "wall" that would become the bar.

This project seemed easy enough, even though we didn't have a clue what we were doing - we were confident in a few of our friends who had experience with wiring. So after a couple afternoons of thinking, discussing, and finally working, we had three light fixtures installed and ready to go (or so we thought).

What we didn't find out until later was that the light fixtures were wired to be on all the time, and weren't connected to any switches! Oops! 

Seemed like a simple problem to fix, so they went to work again, thinking, discussing, and testing different switch configurations to see if they could get something to work. The other light fixtures in the kitchen needed to be replaced as well (square box lights for circular recessed lights), so they started fiddling with those connections too. Before we knew what had happened, we realized one wall of the house had no power whatsoever, and the kitchen lights were permanently on!

Realizing we were in over our heads, we called one of Robbie's student's dad, who is an electrician, to help us get power back to our house the way it should be.

Above the kitchen is an attic crawl space, which became very helpful for getting the switch configuration sorted out.

After several hours of his work over several hot evenings (and lots of those in the steaming attic), he was able to figure out the problem and get the light boxes properly installed to the switches available. It turns out we had several 4-way switches in our kitchen, and quite the complex configuration.

Important lesson learned: Don't take it apart unless you know how to put it back together! (And taking pictures never hurts!)