quirks

 what a battle trying to figure out what size furnace duct I have. turns out I have a 4'' exhaust that measures 5'' x 1''. That fits into a rectangular duct that is 5'' long but is called a 4'' duct since it has the same circumference as a 4'' round...then an adapter to accommodate a round vent pipe...which I plan to send through the wall.

the other important project was trying to stabilize the plaster. I go back and forth thinking the original plaster was flawed or got damaged but lately I think it's simply 90 year old plaster that no one ever tried to maintain or repair or clean or anything. Of course it crumbled. My plan is to stabilize it and finish it and let nature take its course. I'm not covering it with drywall ever. And I embedded rocks in it because that's what made sense.

Electrical goofs

 Just when I think I have a grip on how to wire residential outlets and lights I do something that makes me think again.

I think of electrical as a big loop. There is Hot...which is always hot because it's coming from the panel and is searching for a path to ground...which is supplied by an appliance or lightbulb that completes the circuit. I think of Neutral as only carrying current when the circuit is completed by an appliance. If a light is off or an appliance is not plugged in then I tend to think of the Neutral wire as carrying no potential current. This is contradicted by the nature of alternating current as a back-and-forth loop, but I ignore that to make the physical installation easier to visualize. The loop begins at the hot leg of the circuit panel where the breaker is. The neutral bar also leads back to the transmission wires so it's also a source of current, but I like to think of the hot wire as the 'start' of the power.

Plaster Wall

  My goal was to expose the electrical wires so I could replace them and it ended up as a project to rebuild a lime plaster wall. what a drag.

I'm juggling a few projects right now but I have to focus on the electrical wires. The walls are cosmetic at this point. The ungrounded aluminum wires are more important. Then the metal roof will arrive and I will get into that. But for the next week I have a chance to completely replace the old knob and tube wires with modern grounded Romex. It involved cutting several holes in the ceiling drywall but there isn't an easier solution. It's only a problem because I'm living in the house and cutting holes in the ceiling creates awful drywall dust and also lets the dust of 100 years into the room.

I think this house is closer to something I would call "Cob" and not true adobe brick. It's more like a dirt layer and then covered with lime mortar on the inside and stucco on the outside. I don't see adobe shaped bricks. This is amusing because I went to a village of cob houses and thought they were quite earthy. But the shape of this house is like an adobe house, but it's closer to cob or rammed earth or mud.

This is all relevant because with an earth house the walls need to be able to dry out as fast as the earth so cement interior walls would cause problems by trapping moisture. My goal is to repair the wall surface with something similar to the original so it will not only keep the dirt from falling out but will breathe.

Lime Plaster

There's definitely an argument for leaving everything alone, like this wall that I know is drywall framed over a plaster wall because someone decided to hide problems rather than deal with them.

But the electrical wires are back there, and the drywall had been wet once before, and it's easy to replace but the drywall is currently in the way of my project, so I had to get rid of it.

Time to tear down this drywall

what a mess. 40 years of neglect just falls from the wall.  If I wasn't careful I would've dug a hole right onto the alley.

Although that looks like modern Romex wire, it's actually 12/2 WITH NO GROUND WIRE. I don't know why they manufactured residential Romex without a ground, but I guess they wanted to make sure it was useless to me.

The big question is what is this made of? I determined the wall is 

adobe or compressed mud, covered with a basic lime/sand mortar. It's not modern plaster and the moisture caused the mortar to crumble. The dirt wall is basically in good shape.
 

Do, I buy Type S Lime and some sand...

Mix up a paste of lime...then add sand until I get something like plaster consistency.

This is not easy to do neatly, and I'm not very neat when it comes to plaster in the first place. I'm dealing with a dirt house on an alley and as long as the mortar stays in place and dries up and keeps the dirt inside the wall, I really don't care if there are variations in the surface. So far, it's working. The lime/sand mortar hardens and adheres. I plan to tint some limewash to paint the surface and let net nature take its course.   

The main priority is replacing the wiring with modern Romex. I was recently able to replace all the exterior wiring to the first outlet or junction box inside the house...so all the circuits are independent for the first time in a year. Previously, someone ran 3 white wires from the panel for the hot wires, and a single white wire for the neutral wire. And then at the last junction box before a split of the three circuits they simply spliced into the single neutral with 3 wires to create the neutral path from the circuits. This means that when I shut off one circuit breaker I still have an active neutral from each of the other two circuits that is connected to the circuit that I shut off. Perfect! I did test the circuit and found no current but I didn't totally trust that a spliced neutral would not accidentally choose my fingers as the shortest path to ground rather than go back to the breaker box.

So, now I have modern wires from the breaker, in conduit, the correct color and independent for each circuit, AND there are no frivolous splices in junction boxes where I know I will never need a splice again. Previously, I had a splice in 3 different junction boxes for no reason. It was just splicing two short sections of wire, which is something I can't live with. And it was stranded 12 gauge wire, which I'm not sure is even correct for interior residential.

In the rafters is Classic knob and tube 10 gauge aluminum wire from the 40s or 50s. And I'm in a town with the biggest copper mine in America, and they used Aluminum wire. Some bitter irony right there but I think it was WWII that caused a shortage of copper wire so they used Aluminum before they realized this mismatch of aluminum and copper was a bad idea.

 I have to cut a hole next to each light and then pray I can fish or pull new wire from each switch leg back to a new junction box and then to the light. I think the worst that needs to happen is I cut into the ceiling drywall to facilitate pulling the wire. I'm not a fan of destroying drywall while I'm living in a house. I don't believe in sanding drywall mud when I repair it due to the dust it creates, so the best thing is to avoid using drywall mud by avoiding cutting any drywall. Irregular surfaces on obvious drywall joints is not a detail I care about now or ever. The trick is to make the joints so obvious it looks like it was on purpose. Or just cover them with some trim so it looks fancy.