And in no particular order, here is the first of the Things I Would Do Differently (TIWDD)……
There is a lot of wiring in the house. Much more of it than you think. All of it put in as part of the renovation. And very little of it labelled.
There is cabling for the power sockets, cabling for the lighting circuits (there are around 10 lighting circuits in the kitchen alone), cabling for the network, cabling for the TV, cabling for speakers, cabling for the burglar alarm, cabling for the light switches and then odd bits of cabling for rooflights, doorbells etc. We even put in some spare cables on the basis that it was easy to do with a total renovation. So for example, I put cabling in for a TV in the kitchen (both power and TV aerial) even though we didn’t intend to install one, but the next owner might. Little of it is labelled – at either end.
Now to be fair to the electrician, it wasn’t always clear which room was which when we were doing the renovation. For example, they had assumed that the large bedroom in the old part of the house would be the master bedroom. So it was labelled as such. They never realised that we would use the large bedroom in the new extension as the master bedroom. So when they did label it, the label was often wrong. They adopted their own sort of labelling schema. I am sure that it all makes sense to them, but they aren’t here anymore and I am left with lots of unlabelled cables or oddly labelled cables. 2.5 years in and I have gotten to the bottom of most of it. But it didn’t need to be that hard.
What would I do differently next time?
- Make sure all the cables are colour coded. Most of ours are, but not all. Yellow for data, purple for AV, grey for power etc. We ran out of cable when putting in some of the network points, so some data cables are yellow, but not all;
- I would labelled (with numbers) both ends of every cable and record the numbering on the architect’s electrical diagram. We have a big plan which shows all of the sockets in the house. Using this plan to label the cables would have avoided labels such as “master bedroom” and been a definitive wiring diagram for the house;
- I would have taken more photographs of where the cables run up the walls. Now the walls are plastered, I can’t always remember where exactly the cables run. This is particularly the case with the “spare” cables that have been installed. I took hundreds of photos during the renovation, but I can’t always find exactly the photo I was looking for. I should have gone around after the first fix electrics were done and taken detailed photos.
Most of the cables are colour coded, but not all. Yellow for data. Orange for light switches. Purple for AV. White for the burglar alarm. However, there are some blue data cables around as well as some grey data cables. We simply ran out of yellow data cable during the installation and we could only get grey or blue locally.
There is power and an aerial cable behind the plasterboard (it is dry lined, so there is a gap between the plasterboard and the wall) where two mosaic pictures are hanging. This is for a TV that someone else might want to install some day. I am not exactly sure where the cables are, however, you can see the switch for the power next to the double socket lower on the wall. I should have taken a picture before the wall was plasterboarded.