time for electrical.

Ok, so we now have lights and a fan and heated flooring and outlets in the bathroom...

But backing up a bit, I first had to figure out the wiring scheme for the lights, which I was running off a single circuit devoted to all the overhead lights in the house. Oh, and since this bathroom is a jack and jill bathroom with two doors, I needed to throw in a 3-way switch into the circuit.

I started the original circuit when I had to wire a front porch light after painting the house, which looked like this -

But yeah, throw in a 3-way switch. I drew out a diagram, scratched it out, drew out another, scratched it out, drew out a third, and that's when I felt like I had gotten it right...

The hot coming into the box was tied off with the hot in the 14/3 cable to the 3-way switch and the hot going out of the box to the shower light a few feet to the right. The neutrals were tied from the cable coming in and going out, and the cable going to the first fixture (yeah, there are three fixtures on this switch), while the neutral in the 14/3 cable was coded 'hot' and ran - along with the traveler cable - to each of the two switches.

Yeah, it looked right. But I wouldn't know until I wired it all together. So I spent a couple hours in the attic drilling holes through the joists, running cable, and pulling it through the top plate of the wall framing. Then I tied everything together the way I had drawn it a third time -

Then flipped the breaker back on in the basement, and at last one of the 3-way switches... nothing. Oh well. I figured I'd look at my diagram again and try to - wait! The fixture (being a 1920s replica) had a switch on it, too! So I flicked that and... boom! Light!

It worked! It actually worked.

So the hard part done, the rest of the work I needed to do was cleaning up the mess of old wiring so I could splice in the fan (since I opted for a fancy fan control with a humidity sensor, it needed a constant power source - a neutral - so I couldn't wire it like a light fixture in that first circuit), wire the light above the shower on another switch, and take the spare circuit we wired when we ran cables for the whirlpool tub to wire a GFCI outlet - and second outlet on the load side - and splice from the line side to branch off to power the heated flooring element.

Not tough. A little complicated, but not tough.

Much cleaner than before, with just a single junction box that will be hidden in the wall to splice in the cable for the fan -

The box on the right side of where the vanity will be, with the GFCI box, fan switch, and dimmer for the light over the shower -

The boxes on the left side of the vanity: the 3-way dimmer and outlet that is wired on the load side of the GFCI, and the box where the programmable control (which I found new on Ebay for almost half of what Home Depot was charging) for the flooring element will go -

The whole mess, more or less -

And the pile of old electrical crap that I removed (yay!) -

Seriously, a couple of those boxes looked like the wiring versions of a rat's nest.

And the fixtures, which - now that they're installed - mean I don't have to use my work light anymore -

And the shower light -

Phwew. Now I just have to finish up the plumbing (cutting the 2" cast iron vent stack and installing a bunch of ABS drain and vent pipes, as well as a quick fix on the supplies for the sink and toilet) before I can (yay!) start hanging the walls, installing the heated floor element (I know I linked to Home Depot, but seriously - Ebay has this stuff significantly cheaper!), and tiling the floor...