Today I found myself suspended repeatedly halfway through a 14"x20" hole over a goblin's abyss to wire up a bathroom light.

I should probably back up and explain myself. I've been rewiring the bedrooms in #thisOldClownHouse, because the wiring is old and in this series of rooms has no grounding. This has involved many trips into the attic, tracing out the existing circuits, and making decisions as to what to simply mimic exactly, and what to change. More often than not, I'm following the exact same path that the prior wires ran. This saves me from having to cut any new holes in the rafters, and I've actually been finding the process quite fun. So I've been following along, rewiring just one room, then two then three at a time, as I get a feel for what I'm dealing with. Russ has been helping me disassemble ceiling fans and fishing wire to switches and outlets. We're rocking it as a team.

Then we hit a wall.

Literally. There is a wall. A lath-and-plaster wall. Our attic ends before the hallway does. And after some investigation I realize that the main light fixture of the bathroom is on the other side of that wall. I can see the same black, ungrounded cabling running through a hole in a rafter at the base of the wall, clearly heading to it. It needs to be replaced, but.. there's a wall in the way.

I still haven't figured out why the wall is there. Upon inspection, however, I realized that just before the wall, is the hatch to the upper attic.

Yes, we have two attics. Somewhere in the history of this building a renovation left us with an attic, and then an attic above that attic. I hadn't gone up there. I wasn't sure it was safe to.

So, we called up a local friend who's fond of climbing adventures and he came up into the attic with me to see if we could go up and over this wall, to find and wire up the light.

We successfully set up a ladder on some plywood, climbed up, and yes, this attic went over the wall, and even had a hole through the floor where, in theory, I could go down into the space behind our mystery wall.

...but it had at least a four and a half foot drop, onto what appeared to be some rafters, and either lath and plaster or drywall. Not something to land on. Not something to put a ladder on. And... I'm only 5'4" when I've stretched. I'm strong, and can lift myself pretty well, but that's a long way down steadily, and a very tricky pull back up. And oddly, that was at least a couple of feet above where the rafters should have been. (No, I hadn't had a plan on how I was getting down if there was a hole, I got stuck at "see if there's a way behind the wall") Looking around more, I saw a that this overly tall structure ran only partway through this bizarre bonus room. At where I approximated the bathtub/shower unit sat, it ended, and there was a set of rafters at height I would expect them to be. Further past where I assumed the tub was, was a massive slanting lath and plaster wall. I was looking at the unfinished side, and recognized the tilt. This was the ceiling of the back stairwell. Well, now I had some idea of the layout at least. So, while my climbing friend started to do some math on if it would be possible for us to rig a hard point into the roof beams, and lower me down in a harness, I sought alternate solutions.

Now, I said very concretely earlier that this confounding wall was lath and plaster. It's actually typically pretty tricky to tell whether a wall is lath and plaster, or drywall, and this building is full of both. So, how was I so sure? I was sure because a section of the plaster had fallen off, and was still crumbling, revealing several laths. This section was over a fairly small hole that had clearly been cut into the wall, just above which, an electrical box full of wires for the old fire alarm system was screwed directly into a piece of lath.

The hole was just over a foot square, and was obscured partially by all of the wires, so I hadn't investigated it very thoroughly before.

But we'd now reached the time to find out 1.) where that hole in the wall lead to, and 2.) whether I could fit through it.

So after checking that none of the wires were live (I knew this system was disconnected, but you should always check!), I clipped the wires off and unscrewed the box. I stuck my lamp-adorned head into the hole and looked down.

If any of you are familiar with the story of the goblin door we added to our bathroom lately, you'll understand what I mean when I tell you I was looking directly into the goblin's lair.

The hole was directly over the access area for the plumbing to the tub, so looking down I could see, not just the floor below me, but, presumably, part of the floor below that, before the light failed to penetrate the darkness.

Did I mention that there were two disconnected copper pipes hanging out of this hole? I probably should have realized that this was an old plumbing hatch. I investigated pulling them out, but the descending parts of the right angle each of them made were too long.

The good news, however, was that when I looked forward, rather than down, I saw the lower of the two sets of rafters I'd seen from above. Immediately to my right was the wall of the structure that produced the higher set of rafters, and off to my left I could see the stairwell ceiling. But where was the bathroom light?

Well, if I laid down with my stomach on the large piece of plywood I found that there was a gap under the wall on my right. And through that gap, I could see the cable I was chasing. It went through a series of rafters at the height I'd been expecting, essentially just below where I was laying.

Following this cable involved pulling myself forward, over the goblin's gap, holding myself up on the rafters, which in this room ran perpendicular to the way they'd worked on first side of the wall.

When I'd pulled myself so far in that only my legs themselves were still on the plywood, I finally saw it, the junction box from which the light hung. And, resting myself uncomfortably on that sequence of rafters, I could, in fact, just barely reach it.

I pulled myself in and out of the hole a couple of times, just to prove to myself that I could, and called the exploration a success. I could reach the light. I'd be able to re-wire the next set of rooms the next day, and we weren't going to need to strap me into a climbing harness to do it.

I even had the incredibly optimistic belief that, as I hadn't seen any wire nails or staples, that we might be able to run a snake, attached to the old wiring, back through all those rafters, and I wouldn't even have to climb into the hole!

And so, today, I found myself having moved the plywood, as it had obscured the wiring for the light on the side of the bathroom not hidden behind G. Oblin's attic hideaway, and so, suspending myself between two rafters, one at just about each side of the hole, and heading in head-first over the hole to nowhere, and, as anyone who's wrestled old wiring may understand, wrenching the old wiring out, beam by beam, and then doing the same with the new, as the holes in question were nearly too small to fit the wiring through, and ran at a diagonal from their entry point at the wall through to the depth of the fixture's box. I became exceptionally thankful for the piece of half-inch board that was attached across the studs above the hole on the goblin side, as after testing that it could hold a good portion of my weight, it was used extensively to help me as I slid myself in and out of the hole reaching through the gap between each rafter again and again to pull the wire another couple of inches towards it's destination. (looking down again, it was the last of a series of such boards, apparently there's something of a ladder down into the Goblin Trench).

My abs and obliques ache but I feel incredibly accomplished. Tomorrow we actually attach the various wires I ran today to their fixtures, and one day I expect I'll find myself in Gorblin Oblin's territory again to set up a decent fan.. but, luckily for me, that can wait for a while.