Another days work..

Today I've disconnected the electricity and re-connected the rest of the house as a temporary fix...

Talk about Spaghetti junction!!

There were 2 light switches, about 6 junction boxes, 1 socket.. all disappearing into the wall...

Managed to disconnect the light switches and sockets one by one and remove them from the junction boxes, disconnected the kitchen end and front room end, and ended up with a cable disappearing into the wall.. (In the brickwork on the right)

I started tapping away on the plaster with my finger and got a couple of hollow sounds, and discovered two boxes under each-other.. but none with the correct amount of wires, there were 4 wires going through the wall for some reason.. 3 in brown/red and one in black..

made the assumption that the top box was 3 phase feed through to the workshop.. so left it alone..
the box below it had 3 cables coming in, 4 going through the wall and 2 disappearing to the right... I thought ah, up to the light... but the light disappears down to the switches, and the switches go back up to the left... utterly confusing!

Snipped the ones going to the right off, ripped all 4 cables through, one of the four went to the right so that was good... 3 wires left now.. with 3 coming in!

Now, which is Live, and Neutral and Protective Earth? 2 red/browns and 1 black, surely the black will be ground... nope.. black turned out to be live... as did one of the red brown ones! and the other red brown wasn't live...

So Protective Earth/Neutral is the same wire..  and there must have been 2 different phases going throughout the house... but at the kitchen end there were only 2 wires.... neutral and live..
Connected a big 6mm2 cable that was kicking around up to it, connected the neutral to neutral and live to live and left the 2nd live terminated on a block, and stuck all the cables up in the loft and out of the room... ripped the remainder of wires out of the wall inside the room and got started with help of maria's dad.

Sand was levelled on the ground to go under the insulation, and you can see (It's a very blurry picture I'm afraid!) a pipe on the right to power the water pump in the basement which starts roughly under the door, and another pipe going off at an angle towards it, to get the water feed from the water pump up into what will be the new bathroom and upstairs to the boiler platform.

Reason for the spotty effect, it's to aid grip, the walls are getting re-plastered someone decided (Not me!)

We cut out the wall chases for sockets straight away, I'm making a ring circuit in conduits above the ceiling level right around the room.

The outside wall (On left here) is made of rubble/stone... so Mr Diamond blade disc had to come out on the angle grinder and try to get a bit more depth into the wall for conduit.

 And the start of insulation being laid down, it's 10cm thick XPS polystyrene.
We are using the same stuff as perimeter insulation, but still need to cut it to size.
Let's hope that the concrete slab will be nice and cosy!

School tomorrow so no more 9-6 workdays until Friday!