Wednesday

The electrician came at 9:30 and quickly identified the power source and disconnected our alarm, intercom, radio, and doorbell system installed in 1991, but designed earlier. He gave me the go-ahead for dismantling and patching. 

Now, we have this hole in the kitchen where the main controls were. We’ll leave it as is until we renovate the kitchen, since we will need drywall repair anyway if we open up the kitchen to the living room as we hope to do. The electrician said we might need the electrical lines for something, so it’s best to wait on this one. The other holes are smaller and contain only low voltage wires that have been disconnected.

This box in the front bedroom covered up a three inch hole where that bundle of wires is.

I removed the box, stuffed the wires (low voltage but also disconnected from the power source) inside the wall, and patched the hole with a metal screen we picked up from Ace Hardware this afternoon. I’ll sand it and put on a top coat of spackling, then sand and paint.

This hole is in the laundry room and shows where the ADT installer added the keypad by hooking up to the old system. 

Screen 

1st layer of spackling.

The doorbell replacement is going to require some research. The metal box is 3.5 x 5.5 inches. There are several options, but that large hole . . .

There are three more smaller intercom/radio units throughout the house. Those will require patching as well. These also come with a metal box measuring 7 x 5 inches, maybe too large for a patch. I’ll have to research. The traditional fix is to insert wood supports inside the cavity and attach a piece of wallboard to the wood and then spackle. The traditional approach requires more skill and time.

The remaining pieces of system hardware include a couple of motion censors in the ceiling and one in the garage. I believe the holes will be small, the size of the wire and easy to fix, but nothing is ever as easy as it should be.

We are happy to have this project started. That system with its bazillion wires running all over the attic has befuddled us, and ADT adding on to it made it seem incredibly complicated. The doorbell just adds another wrinkle. But we believe the beast has been slain. Now we just have to carve up the carcass and carry it out.

The weather today was awesome, as usual. The high temperature was 79 degrees with an 11 mph breeze, almost cool at times, especially in the shade.

After lunch, I rode my bike to Weaver Park for yoga and weight lifting. I got to see my regular afternoon buddies that I haven’t seen since I’ve been on the morning shift.

John took Toby to the causeway this morning while the electrician was here. John said Toby didn’t want to walk without his pack, so they just sat in the back of the car with the hatch up, looking out at the water. They were both content to wait until given the all clear.

Toby is curled up beside me as I put this blog entry together.