Electrical refit
So we always knew we’d need the whole house refit with up to date specifications and building regs in relation to electrics. What we didn’t know whas how was the regulations changed and what happened when the build work took so long that this creates a whole heap of new problems.
What went wrong
When you have a builder do an extension or modernise your electrics, make sure you take lots and lots of photos. If they abandon you half way through and after the walls are sealed up, it’s important to know where things are in the walls and what purpose they serve.
It took us ages to figure this out both with the plans and a qualified electrician to work through the way they had laid the cables and try to make them work as intended as they hadn’t finished and there were not always sockets or cables where we expected or where there were supposed to be.
For example our builder had plasterboarded, and in some cases plastered, over the ceilings and walls and we had to play a guessing game using the photos I took to try and locate the cables for the ceiling lights. This was further complicated by steel beams crossing the middle of rooms or odd shaped rooms so you weren’t sure what they had deemed the middle (they left no clue) and had to take a punt and make a hole. Sometimes this was successful first time but often it wasn’t and this left a lot of patching up of new ceilings to be done.
Patching up
The patching up was done as follows:
- Make the hole and realise the damn electric cable isn’t there
- Add small wooden batton to the inside of the hole and attach the original circular piece of plasterboard back into position
- Take masking mesh and cover up the hole including enough of the surroundings
- Use trusty filler in layers as thin as possible to smooth over the gaps
- Sand down inbetween layers to ensure a smooth finish and full coverage of holes
- Paint to match existing
There are loads of YouTube videos online which show you how to do this well. To be honest if you take your time with it, it doesn’t look half bad and you don’t notice them unless you are staring at the ceiling (hopefully nearish to where the actual light is) which you wouldn’t really do.. But still rather the builders had done it properly obviously.
Kitchen requirements
Check the builders have put in the right level of electric circuits for all of the kitchen appliances. Ours hadn’t. They had plasterboarded the wall up before they had laid the correct cables.
Hallway
Our hallway circuits were the worst, they just didn’t make sense. We think the original builder had used a threeway cable instead of a fourway and it was far too late once we discovered this. We did some research and realised you could now get kinetic light switches so we opted for these instead and they work surprisingly well. I’d definitely use them again but at the time we had no idea they were even a thing. The only problem with these was, that the rest of the work took such a long time and the ones that you just stick on the walls had to wait until the very end so you had light switches that were unavailable for a time. Definitely worth waiting for rather than bodging it with the existing cables.
Photos
Takaing photos throughout the build was incredibly useful given the first builders stopped (were told never to come back) after the plasterboard had gone up. It helped identify the wiring and where it looked like it went. This wasn’t always perfect but definitely saved a job.
Sign off
An additional problem was encountered when trying to sign off the electrics work.
Building Control said we needed an EIC (Electrical Installation Certificate) which is issued for new or modified installations.
Our first electrician had long gone and moved on from the terrible builder we used.
Our second electrician had gone abroad for a family emergency and wasn’t coming back.
We asked around and electricians were generally willing to do an EICR which is an Electrical Installation Condition Report and assesses the safety of existing electrical installations.
In order to get an Electrical Isntallation Certificate to satisfy the Building Regulations requirement we had to have the WHOLE HOUSE rechecked and a ton of ‘sloppy’ work redone such as the back boxes being changed because the back had been scraped out. This didn’t feel like a compliance issue but maybe it was and it was required in order for someone to be willing to sign off the work under their name and which cost in excess of £3,000.
