Electrician damage to moldings
Hi, I’m at the start of rewiring a brownstone. This is not a gut renovation – so the process is involved. The house needs an electrical upgrade from a new panel to all wiring with AC lines extended to each room. The electricians that have quoted for the job vary in terms of saying how…
Hi, I’m at the start of rewiring a brownstone. This is not a gut renovation – so the process is involved. The house needs an electrical upgrade from a new panel to all wiring with AC lines extended to each room. The electricians that have quoted for the job vary in terms of saying how much damage will be inflicted on the house – some saying moldings will be heavily damaged as boxes need to go into the ceiling plus wiring put into the walls (including AC wiring) to others just not saying anything. Has anyone rewired their house and has the damage been significant? How did you manage to prevent undue damage to plaster moldings? Did you take a cast of the mold before damage was done to help recast another once the electrician finished? Does anyone have the name of a good plaster restorer person. Many thanks for your advise.
We recently rewired a five story two-family rowhouse with no electrical damage to the plaster crown.
We also took out two load-bearing walls all the way up to the plaster crown without damaging it. We did this by adding a layer of fiberglass over the crown and reinforcing it with plaster prior to removing the walls. No small trick. We made template knives at the start.
There will be numerous patches otherwise to walls and ceilings.
If your reno involves more than electrical, your GC should guide you to an electrician they have a good relationship with as well as tapers and plasterers.
http://www.bgrnow.com
Our solution was to make sure our GC was completely onboard with our desire to keep every bit of original detail possible. Then he cut all holes for electricians, plumbers, and HVAC. Don’t let them do it themselves.
I just had my whole house rewired. The only place where my electrician may have done some damage to plaster decorations was in installing the boxes for pendant fixtures under medallions. Dave Cummings, 718-864-2906 gently took down the medallions, soaked them, restored them, and we made a mould of them out of Mastermould 12-3 from http://www.Abatron.com for rooms where the medallions were missing.
I had some damage done to my moldings by electricians when doing an electrical upgrade. Thad Simerly did excellent repair work for me. He is a real pro and is reasonable, professional and nice. His phone number is: (646) 831-8319 He repaired two big pieces of rosette (one missing when I bought the place, one knocked out by the electricians). He actually HAD the exact mold and was working on a house nearby and had two extra!!! Charge 250 dollars and took 30 minutes.
We did a whole house electrical upgrade with WCK and they didn’t damage one bit of anything. They made holes in the plaster, of course, but not near any moldings. They were able to install current-code electrical boxes into the medallions without damaging them. However, to do it, they cut off the gas nipples — they did not realize the gas was turned off — and they accidentally destroyed the gas line for our upstairs stove. That’s just a minor point though. I highly recommend them. Paul is the owner. They are fast and reasonably priced. Be sure to tell them you want to preserve everything in the house. They have a plaster guy.
When we had our house re-wired the electrician, who had been trained in Europe, made lots of holes in the plaster but completely avoided doing any damage to the molding. However we didn’t replace ALL the old wiring and, specifically, didn’t replace the old round boxes threaded onto unused gas lighting pipes (which would, I think, have damaged the medallions).
This was back in the early ’70s, but I don’t think that’s especially relevant (except that it MIGHT be harder now to find electricians who respect historic detail).