New electric and lights for the basement

Holy cow! I untangled an absolute mess in the basement, something that has bothered me for years. The previous owner buried so much electric behind walls and in the ceiling. In some places, the wires actually started fires. In other places, the guy put wires together with duct tape! Open splices just pushed towards the ceiling in the basement.

Before Christmas I started by removing the wires, rerunning new wires and making connections inside new electric boxes (see the picture). On the morning of Christmas Eve I thought I would spend a few minutes laying out the new can lights. After I got them up, I wanted to hook them up. Five hours later I had to stop to get to a holiday party. The entire upstairs was without power, for two days!

Today, I was able to do a few things. I used about four hours to run two lines directly to the panel. I hooked up all the can lights to their own circuit. There will be quite a few of them in the basement hooked together so I wanted to dedicate a line just for that. Removing the lights from the circuit that the refrigerator was also a goal I had. Every light in the basement was hooked to the same line that feed the refrigerator. The second circuit I added took the entire upstairs off that same refrigerator/basement circuit. Now the upstairs to the old part of the house has their own 20 amp breaker.

Figured I saved just a boat load of money doing this work myself. I priced out this job to the electrician who wired our new service panel in the addition portion--$3000. I spent around a hundred, mostly on wire that would have been cheaper if China wasn't demanding so much.