Hilarious/Terrifying Things We See In Our House: Part Seven

You never know what you will find. The previous owners son of the house I bought had decided to install ceiling fans in each room. When I was remodeling the bathrooms and was in the attic replacing the light/fan I found a birds nest of wires. Three ceiling fans connected to one power line with no junction box. 4 connections and no junction box. It's miracle the house didn't burn down.

This is kind of horrifying really when you think that lives could have been lost due to this homemade firestarter. It shows the need for regulation and standards, fershure.

yeah speaking of gutting, and owning an old house. my bathroom which was built as a repurposing of space, had walls with 2x4's done the *narrow* way, and romex routed just below the surface ( channeled through the drywall with cheap fake paneling right above.. I really hate to think how the wrong nail could have caused some problems. due to the small width.. seeing as how I wasn't up to reframing the whole room, the romex got replaced with MC and at least centered through the stud. and I don't even want to talk about the rats nest of wiring strung around my basement.

Friggin booby traps I tell ya, after being burned a couple a times I wouldnt be surprise if I someday came across the remains of Chester Cooperpot.

Worse one was a few years back when I was installing a thru wall vent for a kitchen exhaust range. I made my first cut outside, through the siding, sheathing,etc poked in the wall cavity to make sure that everything was clear, went back inside to make the 2nd connecting hole.
Started up my angle grinder up to cut through the drywall /plaster wall combo and proceeded to make my cut only to hear a massive pop sound accompanied by blue smoke. I thought that my grinder crapped the bed until I look at the wall and saw what appeared to be melted romex, I couldnt believe it. Some ass left 2 lines of romex (uncapped/not even taped) sandwiched between the plaster and drywall, an electrical circuit to nowhere.
I still never figured out where this line couldnt have went to or what it was for, but spent the rest of that day tracing & pulling the remains out.

Thank God for double insulated tools and well functioning circuit breakers.

Add me to the list of people that found similar wiring issues. I was troubleshooting some wiring in our house and things just weren't adding up. After opening up the wall I discovered someone decided the inside of the wall made a great junction box. . . in multiple locations. Shortly after that, I found live wires in ceiling junction boxes which were stuffed with newspaper prior to being plastered over. I was pretty happy the house hadn't burned down at that point.

I've found similar stuff in our house that was built in the 60's. I went up the attic to run some CAT-5 cables and found a loose live electrical wire just sitting on top of the insulation. Apparently there use to be a ceiling light that one of the previous home owner took out and they just left the live wire tangling there up in the attic... that's SUPER SCARY stuff right there!