Today is one of those days where I feel like I accomplished something significant but when I explain it, it underwhelms even me.
I'll backtrack a moment and lay out the property: 1 acre lot. Long and narrow with a driveway that runs straight down the middle for maybe 40% of the property. House is on the right. Behind the house on the left is a tin "yard barn" that I'm using to store firewood. Next to it is a tin shed that can easily hold 5 cars with two 2 car and one 1 car garage doors. The TARDIS is parked between the yard barn and the shed. After the tin shed, right at the end of the driveway is a carriage house that is just big enough to park a Ford Mustang in. Gravel driveway that is a constant fight to keep the weeds from overgrowing. Gravel floors in all the outbuildings. The tin shed and the yard barn both have rubber matting laid over the gravel. I think someone had a line on conveyor belt material because that's what the stuff looks like--3' wide 23' long strips, laid side-by-side. At first I thought I wanted to put a concrete floor in the tin shed but the driveway is the highest point on the property and there's a significant slope to the shed. Even with a gravel driveway, if I put a concrete floor in the shed I'd have drainage issues to deal with. As it is the water runs through the gravel under the rubber mat. "If it ain't broke..."
The carriage house does not have the rubber matting. And the gravel is uneven and in poor condition. I could level it and cut more rubber matting from an extra roll that was on the property but the carriage house, on the high ground, does not have the drainage issues of the tin shed. So I'm getting someone to come pour a concrete floor for it.
Oh, I forgot to mention, the tin shed has electricity. Lights, outlets and even a 220 outlet for a welder. The carriage house has a light and one old-timey outlet--but the wire feeding power to the building is snipped off. Looking at it, I can't figure how it was wired. Apparently there used to be a big yard light in the middle of the driveway at some point so maybe that's where the garage was connected to. When that went they maybe just decided that building didn't need electricity.
Well since I'm putting in a concrete floor and the building is only a dozen feet from the nearest electrical outlet in the tin shed I decided to get it wired for power. National Electric Code calls for outdoor-rated cable. It can be straight buried in a 2' deep trench. If it is in a rigid metal conduit it only needs to be 6" deep. After digging a 6" deep trench between the buildings I decided to rummage around and sure enough, I had a dozen feet of rigid metal electrical conduit. So I ran that cable in the conduit and got it buried yesterday. And I gotta say, in infrastructure there's a saying about the "last mile" being the hardest. I probably spent 75% of my time yesterday fiddling with the trench so that the ends would terminate at the right depth and the right point inside each of the buildings. But I got it done. I've also gotta say, my mind thinks it is inside a 30 year old body. I definitely overdid it with the digging.
So today was connecting everything up. Theoretically easy. Open up your electrical boxes on each end, strip your wires and splice your black, white, and ground wires on each end into their boxes and then button everything back up. I did have a nicer, modern switch/duplex outlet leftover from another project to put in the carriage house, but I realized I didn't have an electrical box for it and the existing box wouldn't work so I kept the single 2 prong outlet and the pull-cord on the light fixture. I did have to move the outlet to the other side of the carriage house from where it was but that was relatively simple. Now getting the outdoor rated power cable stripped was a real turd. Regular power cable for indoor use has a fairly thin plastic outer casing and then the insulated wires are wrapped in paper. Outdoor cable is more like an extension cord. The cladding is molded around the wires. And my knives are embarrassingly dull. Managed to get it cut and (after much sweating and cursing and failing) spliced in the carriage house. (Do that end first because it saves having to worry about the breaker.) Then it was into the tin shed for the final connection. First I plugged my little wiring tester into the outlet--more to see if it had power than if it was wired correctly. There would've been much cursing if the outlet turned out to be bad. Luckily it wasn't. As an added plus, I could see the tester from the breaker box so I didn't have to walk back and forth to see if I'd found the right breaker. It was, of course, the 2nd to the last one on the panel. When I cracked open the outlet, it didn't look to be wired up right. By this time I'd also stabbed myself in the thumb so when I went in to slap a Band-Aid (and later a strip of electrical tape) on that, I consulted my handy "Reader's Digest Complete Do-It-Yourself Manual" on extending a circuit. Fixed the wiring. Then, before proceeding, I had the bright idea to test my repair so I went and reset the breaker. It hummed and immediately tripped.
Went back to have a look at it and I'd stupidly miswired it. Redid the wiring and tried it again and it worked the way it was supposed to. Then I attached the connecting wires, plugged in my tester, and reset the breaker. The outlet still worked. Went in the carriage house. The light was on. Success! Of course that's when I remembered I still needed to button up that outlet. So I tripped the breaker again, got all the wiring tucked in and screwed down, reset the breaker and tested again. This time I brought a battery charger with a 2 prong plug into the carriage house and it worked in the outlet--it even worked in the outlet with the light off, so everything is wired right. Just to push my luck, I checked the light code shown on my test plug and the outlet was actually wired properly. So the only thing I didn't test (and it would've been easy to do but should not be necessary) is that the light in the carriage house works when something is plugged into the carriage house outlet. I guess I didn't check that the light in the carriage house works when something is plugged into the tin shed outlet but that's pretty much how wiring works so it really shouldn't need to be tested.
So yeah, tremendous sense of accomplishment, but the reality is that I have a bare lightbulb with a pull-chain and a single 2 prong outlet in a gravel floored garage that work tonight that did not work this morning. Small victories.