Look at that innocent seeming outlet. Sure the wall is a bit dirty, but... it's just an outlet, right? I went through quite a process to make that happen.

In the void that was my blog last year, my moving a few blocks closer to downtown in San Mateo was summarily skipped. Additionally, all the work I did cleaning up and painting the garage attached to said new apartment was also... summarily skipped. The intent of the garage is to house all of my makey things. The CNC machine, the 3D printer, all of the electronics stuff, and still room to grow. It's my mad scientist lab and I wanted it to be all snazzy looking. I'll save the actual rennovation process for another post, what we're concerned about today is electricity.

In its natural state, the only point of power was an outlet thing spliced off of the shitty light socket. It doesn't exactly instill lots of confidence considering that the idea is to pull lots of amps over that wiring. As if that weren't bad enough, I just recently figured out that this socket isn't even on my circuit, meaning that one of my neighbors has been fronting the bill for all the juice I've been using. Well, that's certainly not cool and, as a final thing, powering a shop from the ceiling is hardly convenient.

So, over the last few weeks, I've been trying to figure out how to drop power from my apartment down to the garage. Luckily, my apartment sits atop all three garages, so I've got a fair amount of latitude. I finally identified two sockets on different breakers that I could splice power off of and finagle downstairs. To keep things tidy, the idea was to drill through the floor within the walls. That does mean I have to do things like this.

Generally speaking, this is something that forfeits one's depost, but I've got the stuff and knowledge to patch this up from working on the garage. It also helps that this is a wall not often seen and already shoddy in terms of drywall. Now that I was in the wall, I needed to figure out exactly where this was going to drop in the garage ceiling. Luckily, I invested in some crazy long drill bits, so I drilled the hole that the wire would drop through and then used a narrower bit to push through the garage ceiling.

Now that I knew where I was dropping out, it took some more drywall mutilation to start running it down the nearest garage wall.

Murphy's law got in the way, of course, and my wire didn't show up in the hole I sawed out for the gang box. So, I got clever to figure out what was up and shoved my phone in the hole to take a picture.

A cross beam... goddammit. A little bit of well placed wall knocking plus a few small holes later, and I figured out where the beam was and cut yet another hole in the wall so I could retrieve the wire... except I still couldn't find the damn thing. So, I had to alter this small hole to fit my phone yet again.

Through a dusty haze that evokes feelings of a wrecked Titanic, and I spotted the wire. Thank god there weren't more cross beams.

I managed to snag the wire, pull it through, and then angled a hole through the cross beam.

Luckily, that was the last of the bullshit I had to put up with and, despite the fact that I've now got more drywall work ahead of me, the garage part isn't going to be too bad to fix.

As of right now, I've not yet wired this into the outlet in my apartment, but that should probably be fine. Working with the wire itself was a bit of a pain because I opted for 12 AWG wire, wire that'll probably withstand more current than any of the other wires in the walls of this apartment.

Because, if this place is going to catch on fire, it sure as hell isn't going to be my fault. At least until I wire up the second socket, which involves navigating around a gas line...