Additional Socket

The dining room only has two single sockets so these have been converted to doubles.  In addition, the ring will be extended to a new double socket on the other side of the room.  The chosen socket to be extended is fed from above, so new cables will be taken out of the bottom of the current socket, channeled behind the skirting board, then carried under the floor.


Here is the existing socket after conversion to a double, with a section of plaster chopped out for the new wires.

The plaster is very soft, so cutting the channel was easy.  There is quite good under-floor ventilation, so a piece of kitchen roll is temporarily stuffed in the hole to try and stop the cold draft.

To facilitate pulling the cables, as well as the future job of moving the radiator, an access hole had to be cut in the floor.  I came across something I have never seen before.  To prevent drafts in the days before manufactured T & G timber was available, this floor uses grooved boards with a steel strip joining them together.  Of course, the damp air has got into the metal and over the years some of the steel has simply rusted away, as you can vaguely see here :

One of the bad side effects of the rusting process is that the steel expands and puts pressure on the groove in the timber, hence some of the boards are completely split along the edge.  Here is a particularly bad example :

Really we should pull up the whole floor and replace it, but as the timber is basically sound, and the rusted steel inserts are only really around the edges adjacent to the walls (as far as we can see), we are opting to make do and mend.  The room will be carpeted, so a multitude of sins will be hidden for someone else to discover in the future.