Success in the ceiling!

Finally progress on wiring the ceiling fan for the family room! I pushed some of the insulation away from the hole and discovered that it wasn't as bad as I'd feared. I found that there is sufficient support in the ceiling for the fan, so I was able to return the support I'd bought a few weeks ago. And I had a joist handy to guide me to the west wall. I cut the old box down, and got started trying to route the wire.

There was no way I could reasonably just push a wire up there and be done with it, so I attempted to find my way with a piece of moulding, but didn't get very far. Then I tried the conduit, and got a little better - but still no luck. I peered up the 4" hole at the far end of the ceiling but didn't see anything. So, I opened it up another couple inches so I could get a hand up there. I drove the moulding in again, and shoved my hand into the ceiling. Groped around some, and found it!

Above the drywall, the roofline slopes inward pretty quickly. So every time I shoved the "probe" toward it, I was hitting that slope, not the wall itself. With this newfound knowledge, I taped the end of my wire to the end of the moulding, sent it in again, reached up and retrieved it.

Elapsed time: close to 2 hours. Pathetic, ain't it?

The rest of running the wire was pretty simple. Just hang the conduit and run the line through. Only snag there was cutting the conduit and brackets. My first attempt, using a standard Dremel cut-off wheel, ended in spectacular the instant the wheel touched the plastic. It just shattered. I fell back to the reinforced cut-off wheel and that worked a lot better - a combination of cutting and melting the plastic.

Now I just need to finish running the wire to the switch, get the new boxes in the ceiling and wall, seal things up and we're almost done.