Re: Working on that..
You're both UK-based by the sound of it. Last regs that enabled you to do your own electrical work were the 15th. I rewired my entire previous house under 14th regs with a bit of guidance from my then-girlfriend's father who was a qualified electrician. Couldn't afford to employ anyone to do it. Hours and hours of channelling walls and running cables. It was alright until it came to pulling floorboards and running cables in the loft...
This was in Poole and I lived on Poole Quay. Poole Quay was a heavy industry area before it got gentrified in the 90s. At the top of my road was a town-gas gasworks (it processed coal into town gas with a byproduct of coal tar soap). At the bottom of the road was the part of the quay where the colliers pulled up to discharge the coal. Joining the two was an overhead cableway carrying the full buckets to the gasworks and the empty ones back round again... and quite frequently the neighbourhood kids too.
So, pulling floorboards upstairs revealed a good 20mm of very fine coal dust that had accumulated over the years. I had no choice but lift Every. Single. floorboard to clean the mess out. I thought I worked in IT but you could have fooled me - for weeks I looked more like a coal miner. Downstairs was another mess - living next to the sea brought flooding and pulling the floorboards there I found 1940s cabling literally sitting in seawater. I dropped a concrete raft in and ran the cables down the walls from upstairs.
It was an interesting exercise but I have no desire to ever repeat it.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
