Office Space- Electrical Wiring
Posted by Wayne
Electricity seems to mystify (and scare) a lot of people, however I find it quite interesting and easy to work with. As far as being scared, I can’t blame those people… but it’s easy to avoid getting shocked. If I’m changing a light fixture I turn off the switch and tape it down with some masking tape so no one turns it on causing me to forget what the off position is. If I’m working with an electrical outlet, I plug something into it and turn it on, make my wife stand there, and then go outside to the breaker box and turn off breakers until she yells that it isn’t working anymore.
Now that I’ve said it’s easy to avoid getting shocked, I have in fact been shocked with 110v several times and it wasn’t too bad (nothing on my body smoked afterwards). I understand that getting shocked with 220v is a much more electrifying experience, and as I have future work involving 220v in the queue I will plan on being much more careful with that.
Before mounting electrical boxes to the framing I had to make a decision on exactly where we wanted the outlet(s) located on the wall. It was at about this time that I made the decision that I would be custom building and laminating a wall mounted permanent desk. I figured the computer would plug in down below and the computer monitor would plug in through a grommeted hole through the desk. I also wanted to have an outlet above the desk just for plugging in things every now and then without having to crawl around under the desk.
You average electrical outlet box would require a 2×4 for mounting due to the the depth of the box. You can buy a box that is only 1.25 inches deep. However, as you can see from the image below the nail/screw holes on these shallow boxes are useless for the typical side mount configuration (which I had planned on finding when I went shopping for these shallow boxes). The only thing I could figure is that the manufacturer plans on you using these things after you have put in the drywall (pushing them in from the outside). To test that theory, I cut a perfect hole into a scrap piece of drywall and put one of this in there as securely as possible and it just ripped right out.
If you installed one of these from the outside, it wouldn’t last a day. You can’t install it from the inside because the tabs of the screw holes won’t let it go through the hole you cut in the drywall. I still can’t figure out what they expect you to do with these things.
My solution to the problem was brute force (as it is often the case when I get angry at an inanimate object). The front of the electrical box needs to extend 1/2″ past the framing if you’re using 1/2″ drywall, so I put a 1.25 inch piece of wood on the wall behind the box to screw it to (1.25″ + 1.25″ = 2.5″, or 1/2 inches sticking out past the 2×2, and the drywall was 1/2 inch so they would be flush).
I cut a 2×4 into a 1.25 inch piece by running it lengthwise through a table saw and secured a piece of it to the wall behind each box with a cement screw. I snipped off the tabs for the screws on the boxes so they would go into the drywall from behind and just screwed right through the back of them into the 1.25 inch wood. This left me with an very strong outlet box of the perfect depth. I covered up the screw heads with electrical tape before installing the outlets.
The standard height for a desk is 30″ so I mounted the bottom of the upper box about 4″ above that and I mounted the lower box about 12″ off the ground (see the very top image of this post to see what I’m talking about). At that time I was staring at an almost blank canvas and these types of thing are tough for me to picture. Thankfully the positioning ended up perfect in the final product.
To get electricity to the outlets I simply tapped into the wiring for two outlets running in the unfinished part of the basement. These were running off of a 20 amp breaker and after some quick research I was confident that I could add a couple more outlets onto the circuit. I would only be connecting a computer and maybe a lamp in the new office, and I knew those wouldn’t draw much power. However, as I am planning on finishing the unfinished basement in the not-too-distant future and plan on having an electronics laden man room, it will not be an option to tap into this circuit again and I will have to add another breaker in the breaker box for the new outlets.
Connecting the outlets was a breeze and the toughest part about it was getting all of the wiring and the outlet to fit into the tiny electrical outlet boxes. With all the trouble those things gave me I would have been better off just framing that wall with 2×4’s and sacrificing the couple of inches of space in the room.
The last electrical work I’d have to do before putting in the drywall was to figure out the lighting. There was an existing single lightbulb and wall switch already mounted in this space when we moved in, so it would only require that I remove the light bulb housing and replace it with recessed “can” lighting. This required some simple rewiring and mounting the can up in between the 2×2 strips that I had run across the ceiling. The recessed lighting was nice because once you mounted it to the ceiling framing it extended down a perfect 1/2 inch so it would be flush with the drywall once that was hung.
I also replaced the light switch with a dimmer switch so it could be very light if my wife was working down there and I could turn the lighting down if I wanted to geek out and play a computer game or something.
The next step in my project was to drywall the room.
Leave a Reply