a hundred degrees

Saved By Plastic - or - The Most Expensive Towel Bar Replacement Project Ever

The towel bar by our shower has been loose for a while. Accordingly I was always very careful when I placed towels on it or removed them. Recently we got rid of our glass shower doors which have been cracked since we bought the house in 1998 and were beginning to drop splinters. Lexie had always hung her towel on the outer bar of the shower door. Since she began using the towel bar its inevitable release from the wall accelerated quite a bit.

The towel bar's failure did not surprise me too much since it was relying on nothing more than simple anchors in the sheetrock. There were no studs to hold the bar's ends more firmly in the places where we wanted them.

Obviously I was the first person in history to encounter this problem, so I invented my own solution. Here was my thought: The towel bar is a little over two feet long. In that distance it probably crosses in front of a couple of wall studs. I'll simply cut out the sheetrock the width of the towel bar an inch and a half high. I'll fasten a one by two (three quarter inches by one and a half inches for those with rules) to the studs, putty it in, and paint over it. Then I'll screw the towel bar to the much-sturdier-than-sheetrock one by two.

Monday night I got out my stud finder and found that the battery was dead. I replaced the battery but couldn't make any sense of the readings I got as I passed it back and forth along the wall. At this point I almost went up to the attic to take a look and see where the studs were. Instead I made the nearly fatal decision not to, deciding that it didn't matter where the studs were since I was going to be cutting a long hole in the wall no matter the lay of the land.

I began by using a utility knife to cut a small strip about half an inch wide between the screw holes left by the fallen bar. After I had cut away over a foot of sheetrock I still hadn't found a stud. I began to despair, but finally a few inches further I uncovered it. It was right in the middle of the span, so I knew that I would not find another one. This was going to complicate my plan a little. Now I'd have to invent some way to stabilize the one by two so that it wouldn't rock back and forth and break loose from the surrounding sheetrock.

Using the utility knife I finished my half inch wide slit. That was an awful lot of annoying work and I knew that the rough edges it left were going to be a pain to work the piece of wood into. After I'd marked off the lines for the full width, I walked into the living room and told Lexie that if I were a manly man I'd use a circular saw set for the proper depth to widen the slit to and inch and a half. That might have been safer.

I opted for a jigsaw. It was lighter and easier to maneuver at shoulder height. Also I would be able to cut from edge to edge only having to leave the portion above the stud to trim later with the utility knife. I started on the right hand side of the slit arcing up and over onto the new higher line. The cut went easily and looked smooth. I felt pretty smart. That feeling lasted about ten seconds.

I moved the blade to the left hand side of the stud and began to trace the same arc up and over to the left. Suddenly the sound of the blade changed. This was followed almost immediately by sparks shooting out of the wall at me. I stopped the saw and removed it from the slit as quickly as I could.

I looked down at the jigsaw blade and saw that I would not be using it again. A little smoke puffed from the wall but it was associated with the sparks and those stopped as soon as I backed the saw off of its leftward path. I had run my power saw right into an electric cable and lived to tell the tale. This was because God wanted me around to help with the kids and Sears housed their ¼HP Scroller Saw in plastic. I didn't feel a thing, except a little surprised. I had only thought this was getting complicated with only one stud. Now I had a real complication.

Laughing a little I walked out to the living room and asked Lexie if anything had flashed or blinked. She looked at me blankly. I told her about the sparks and she got a little bit upset.

I went back and excavated a bit more of the wall so that I could see what I had hit. It was a pretty big cable. Since there is no plug on that wall in the bathroom and our power cables drop out of the ceiling I figured that it must be something on the other side of the wall. I walked around and found the oven. I went out to the breaker box in the garage, but could not find a fuse labeled "stove" or "oven." I tried several that seemed like they were in the right general area, but every time I walked back in to the kitchen the stove's digital clock still shone clearly.

Before Lexie could help me deal with this problem we had to get the kids to bed. Once that was done Lex stood in the kitchen and watched the stove clock as I flipped every breaker in the box one by one. The clock never went dark.

About this time Forrest called. He informed me that not only had other people actually hung towel bars where there was only sheetrock, but there was an accepted method and appropriate fasteners. He chided me for not consulting him on home improvement matters. Okay, show of hands from all of you who think of Forrest when you think of household maintenance.

While on the phone with Forrest I pulled out the pan storage drawer beneath the oven and laid eyes on the big triangular 220 volt plug and a portion of the wire which I had seen a little bit of on the other side of the wall. I also climbed into the attic, dangerously balancing a flashlight and the phone as I stepped from rafter to rafter. There I clearly saw the cable running down beside the stud, a sight that would have saved me a lot of trouble if I'd seen it earlier. The cable did not head for the fuse box in the garage, but instead took off toward the far side of the house. Climbing down and heading outside I found the big breaker box. Forrest suggested I call my dad or google for information about big breakers.

Dad, I knew, was in bed. Google was not going to yield anything fruitful quickly. Paul is in Hawaii for the week. So I called Rob. After I explained what had happened to him, he said that he figured that the stove was on its own circuit from the big box and I should just click them off one by one until I found it. He also said that from what I had described, he guessed that we could repair the wire and he would come over Tuesday to help.

On the third of the four big breakers I found the one that killed power to the stove. It was a pair of breakers connected to move as one, each with a "50" label. I had my Sharpie with me and wrote "Stove" beside the breakers.

When Rob came over last night the first thing we did was to cut away more of the wall so we could get a better look at the wire. Then we had to strip away some of the insulation so that we could get a better look at the damage. We found that the cable was constructed such that the ground wires were just under the insulation wrapped around the interior two main wires. It appeared that I had cut more than a few ground wires and made a pretty good headway into one the wires. The sparking had probably been across the jigsaw blade between the ground and that one wire.

Rob adjusted his position. He recommended that I have a professional electrician evaluate the situation. "He may say that there's plenty there to run the 220 volts and 100 amps, but you're safer having him make the call. More likely he will need to take out yet more of the wall and either end up splicing some good cable in or, God forbid, running a whole new cable."

Rob told me that he knew a good guy who did the electrical work at his office that he would get me in touch with. When I checked in with Rob this afternoon I learned that the electrician dude was out of the office today. Rob had left him a message and expected a call first thing in the morning.

Meanwhile we're without a stove. Which isn't that big a deal for now.

Posted to Family and Home at October 6, 2004 10:25 PM