Electrical wiring

It’s been a long time since I wrote any updates about our house. We’re finally slowing down after a long push all summer to make the house habitable inside. We worked 12 hour days for months to get the electricals, plumbing, cabinets, countertops and shelving installed. It’s mostly done now and we’re able to relax a little and enjoy the house and its surroundings.

The electrical wiring was one of our challenges this summer. Because there’s no drywall to cover up wiring, there are two approaches you can take: build false walls to hide the wiring, or put the wiring inside exposed metal raceways. We chose the latter approach, using Wiremold V500 raceways. I was a little worried that the raceways would look ugly, but they blend in well with the lines and color of the wood interior.

It was a bit tricky to figure out how to mate the NM-B (“Romex”) electrical cable in the basement with the THHN single wires in the raceways upstairs. Eventually we came up with a scheme using flexible water-tight conduit, which is normally used for underground wiring. We mounted plastic junction boxes on the beams in the basement:

Then we ran flexible conduit from the junction boxes up through 7/8 inch holes drilled in the floor next to posts. The holes in the floor were hidden behind Wiremold connectors that are normally used for transitions to metal outlet boxes.

Here is what one of these connectors looks like completely assembled and installed over the hole in the floor:

Here is the disassembled connector:

We didn’t have to use Wiremold raceways behind the cabinets, because the wires would be hidden. So we built false walls for the countertop outlets and brought the Romex cable straight up through holes in the floor to the outlets.

Aside from inventing the transition from Romex to Wiremold, the rest of the electrical design was taken from books. We found that it worked best to learn from three books: one for professionals, one for beginners, and one containing a summary of the electrical code. Each book by itself wouldn’t have been enough, but as a group, each filled the gaps in the other two.