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David Bridgeman
04-12-2010, 1:36 PM
My wife and I are renovating the kitchen. We are moving part of a nonload bearing wall to expend the kitchen. When we stripped off the drywall this is what we found: (see picture).

Apparently, the former owners put a door in the wall and had to move the wire going through that part of the wall. So, the cut the wire, moved it over and spliced it with another piece of wire. No wire nuts, no electrical tape!

Gene Howe
04-12-2010, 1:42 PM
Good Lord!
BIL moved into an old house that had a freezer on the back sun porch. The previous own had wired an extension from the closest outlet in the house, through a hole in the wall to another outlet where he plugged in the freezer.
The kicker was that he used TV ANTENNA wire!

Eric DeSilva
04-12-2010, 2:00 PM
This Old House's website used to have pictures of home inspection nightmares with stuff like that.

Kind of makes you wonder what other renovations they performed.

Zach England
04-12-2010, 2:09 PM
I found some knob&tube in my attic that was jerry-rigged like that. Pretty scary.

Matt Meiser
04-12-2010, 2:14 PM
In my brother's house I found several junction boxes (at least they used those) that had wires joined like this but taped. However they didn't know what that bare wire was for so they separated them and wrapped each with a thick layer of tape so it wouldn't touch the box or anything else.

Dave Anderson NH
04-12-2010, 2:32 PM
You are indeed lucky David. Think of the possibilities if you had NOT found it.

David G Baker
04-12-2010, 2:33 PM
I have an old updated farm house that was once owned by a licensed electrician. You would not believe the garbage that he did in this house. I will admit that every splice that he made inside of walls were soldered and taped very well but not up to any code. He would add pieces of wire to make the wire reach where he wanted it to and splice it together using the solder and tape method. It makes me nervous when I think of what I haven't found yet lurking behind lath and plaster walls.
There are electrical fires on the news in my area frequently, caused by poor wiring practices.

Jim Rimmer
04-12-2010, 5:35 PM
Wow! Glad you still have a house.

Mike Cutler
04-13-2010, 5:33 AM
Well,, Air gap is the best insulator.:rolleyes:

That kinda sucks. Usually people at least attempt to make it look like they were trying to comply with the code. That one, no attempt was made.
Hopefully you can pull the run back to a convenient location and properly locate the splice inside a box that won't effect your remodel.

Good catch!

Mike Cruz
04-13-2010, 7:46 AM
So, David, you gonna rip out the rest of the drywall in the entire house to make sure the rest of the wiring doesn't look like that?! :eek:

Wow, scary, man...scary. You never know what you're gonna find...

While redoing my house, we were trying to get the wallpaper off, and it was destroying the drywall (the previous owners hadn't sized ((primed)) the walls. So, in the master bedroom, we decided to just rip out all the drywall and start from scratch. While taking off a strip of molding at the wall/ceiling joint (hard to call a 1" piece of molding "crown") I noticed that there was a 14 gauge wire run behind it. (Can you guess where this is going?) YUP, when they nailed it up, they put a nail right through wire. Luckily, it went right throught he middle, not touching the black or white wire. It did touch the ground, so I suppose that potentially could have been a problem. Another nail pierced the outside sheathing of the wire, but didn't break the coating around the black wire. I (they), WE ALL got VERY lucky...

Tom Godley
04-13-2010, 4:44 PM
I bought an old house and one day I unplugged an old cracked extension cord from a craw-space outlet. Latter that day I noticed the second floor bathroom medicine cabinet was not working. Here the previous owner wired the medicine cabinet down through the inside wall all the way to the basement -- with an extension cord! At first I had trouble determining this because when I plugged the cord back in the medicine cabinet did not work.

It was only after I removed the medicine cabinet and found a cord hanging that I understood he plugged three extension cord together and I had unplugged one when I pulled the cord in the basement.