thinking of Nigel Tufnel

Well, if you're going to crank your amps to 11, you're going to need some electricity. Our electrician, Celestino, has started roughing in the flexible blue conduit (Electrical Nonmetallic Tubing, or ENT) that will carry the power and control lines through the interior partitions. We've been reviewing the locations of the outlets and tweaking the electrical plan to make sure our outlets are located where they're most needed - near dressers or tables, for example - while also meeting the code requirements that there always be an outlet within six feet of a door, and then spaced no more than twelve feet apart after that.


There are a lot of advantages to using metal studs for the interior partitions, and one of them is the ease with which we can snake the ENT through them. The studs are pre-punched with holes for this purpose, and the electricians use plastic sleeves to protect the conduit from the relatively sharp edges of the studs.

One concern with the layout of the junction boxes (the galvanized boxes that will hold the outlets and switches) is that we're trying to avoid having them sit back to back. This is an easy way to lay out the outlets, and it corresponds to how our electrical engineer laid out the outlets, but it also creates an opening through the partition that allows sound to travel too easily from one room to another. This is a small issue in the grand scheme of things, except that it was going to happen twice in the wall that will separate the bedrooms of two teenagers. That wall really ought to be built of giant limestone blocks and lined with lead, but we ran into budgetary constraints.