I’m just kicking back with a pint of coffee stout after finishing a job wiring an electrical outlet that should have taken twenty minutes but ended up taking a little over five hours.

It should have taken only twenty minutes because I already wired up a string of electrical outlets that I mounted on the basement ceiling so I could plug in a series of fluorescent lights that I could turn on at a switch. At that point, connecting the string of outlets to an existing wall outlet was a simple matter of shutting off the circuit breaker, running the wire into the wall outlet’s box and splicing the circuits together. Easy.

Or not. The wall outlet was an old style two-prong outlet that I wanted to replace with a three-prong GFCI-protected outlet, a fancy way of saying “an outlet that keeps you from being electrocuted.” I like not being electrocuted, so I figured replacing it with a GFCI outlet was a good thing. Where I got into trouble was when I tried to shove it into the metal box that was made to hold the narrow, old style two-prong outlet. A GFCI outlet is a brick. It appears to be designed to fit into a small outlet, but that’s a fantasy. After I connected all the wires to the back I quickly realized there was no way I’d be able to crowd it into that tiny little box with all those wires bunched up behind it.

The thing to do would be to install the GFCI outlet in a new box, but I couldn’t replace the old one because of the way it was installed. It would have involved tearing out a bunch of wooden framing, not something I wanted to do. I thought I saw a way to do it by mounting the GFCI outlet in a surface-mounted junction box, but after doinking around for an hour or so with that idea I came to the conclusion that wasn’t going to work. The surface box didn’t have enough room for the outlet, either. The only way I could possibly make this work, it seemed, would be to mount a new box in the wall with enough room for the outlet. That involved undoing all the connections, cutting a hole in the wall, moving the surface-mounted junction box, tearing out some of the wiring and rerouting it behind a section of drywall.

By the time I was cutting a hole in the wall with a saw I’d made up a song consisting largely of just one four-letter word repeated over and over. It seemed to help.

Oh, I almost forgot: A GFCI outlet won’t work unless it’s grounded. That’s what the “G” part of GFCI stands for. I thought the outlet would be grounded because it was connected to a metal conduit, but it turned out not to be. Not at all. And going to all the trouble of installing a GFCI outlet would be kind of stupid if I didn’t take the trouble to ground it, so I did, which involved fishing a wire through the joists above the ceiling panels that I could connect to the water main, where all the electrical outlets were grounded. Took about an hour and a lot of cussing.

So: The outlet box was installed, the ground wire was connected, the wires all fit – what else could go wrong? Just the connections with the ceiling outlets, the whole reason for starting this project in the first place. I recycled some of the wall outlets that were left over from the renovation of this house. Recycling sounds like a conscientious use of resources, to say nothing of how good it feels to a cheapskate like me when I don’t have to pay for something, but I should have checked the outlets to make sure they were configured so I could daisy-chain them the way I did. There’s a little brass tab that you can break off if you wanted to isolate the top outlet from the bottom. Apparently that’s what the last guy did, but I didn’t check, so they weren’t all getting juice. I had to jerry-rig a jumper to get the first outlet connected to the second one.

And that’s where I stopped. I couldn’t stop before that, on account of all the bare wires sticking out of the walls, but at this point everything was tucked away and nothing was going to start a fire. Most important of all, I was tired and ready to take a break with a cold beer in hand, five hours after I started this twenty-minute project.