{"id":627,"date":"2011-05-08T19:44:09","date_gmt":"2011-05-08T23:44:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jillcarson.com\/blog\/?p=627"},"modified":"2011-12-01T16:00:45","modified_gmt":"2011-12-01T20:00:45","slug":"removing-electrical-outlets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.jillcarson.com\/blog\/2011\/05\/removing-electrical-outlets\/","title":{"rendered":"removing electrical outlets"},"content":{"rendered":"

So I thought about the banquette occasionally for more than a month, always stalling out on the need to call an electrician and get the outlets moved. And then I realized that I didn’t actually have to move the outlets – I could just remove them. And that’s something I felt pretty confident I could do. <\/p>\n

First step to any electrical job – turn off the breaker. In this case, right after doing that, make sure the refrigerator isn’t on the same circuit, because that would mean I had to work fast. Turns out this circuit only has four outlets on it – the two that need removing, and the two counter-height ones to the left of the sink. Awesome.<\/p>\n

Then I unscrewed the outlet covers, unscrewed the outlets, and unscrewed all the screws that held wires to the outlet. Then I went into the basement and pulled the wires down. Well, mostly. There was one that just would not come, so I abandoned it in the wall – there’s no electricity to it anymore, so it’ll just sit there until some future homeowner opens up the wall to do something.<\/p>\n

Then I connected the wires in the basement so the circuit still carried electricity to the counter-height outlets, and put the connections into a junction box so they’re not exposed. Then I flipped the breaker on and checked the outlets to make sure they worked, and indeed they did.<\/p>\n

Actually, I skipped over a step – when I’d made the first connection in the basement, I decided to test the circuit so I could fix it if I’d messed something up already. So I flipped the breaker on and clipped my circuit tester to the wires to see if the little light would light up. Except for how my circuit tester has a bit of metal like a pen clip on it that I was touching at the time. I got a pretty impressive buzz up my arm, and I dropped the tester really fast. At least I knew the circuit worked. I was a bit more cautious for the rest of the electrical process, too.<\/p>\n

Anyway, with the wires and outlets out, the final step was patching the holes – even though they’ll be behind the banquette, it just seemed wrong to leave the gaps open. This is what the wall looked like after patching (I didn’t bother repainting – I’ll do whatever touchups are needed when I’m painting the banquette): <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I also took the baseboards off so I could butt the boards right up against the wall, which is why the wall changes color right there. Conveniently, that also exposed the sheetrock screws – telling me where all the studs are.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So I thought about the banquette occasionally for more than a month, always stalling out on the need to call an electrician and get the outlets moved. And then I realized that I didn’t actually have to move the outlets – I could just remove them. And that’s something I felt pretty confident I could […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-kitchen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jillcarson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jillcarson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jillcarson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jillcarson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jillcarson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=627"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.jillcarson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/627\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":653,"href":"http:\/\/www.jillcarson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/627\/revisions\/653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jillcarson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jillcarson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jillcarson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}