Showerthought: The before and after difference in a customer's attic cable job after 10 years
I was up in a crawlspace last week redoing old coax runs from 2014, and the before was a tangled mess of dusty cables with no labels. The after was my tidy work with Velcro ties and a clear junction box, which took me about three hours to straighten out. Has anyone else noticed how customers never see what their attic looks like until it's too late?
...and that's exactly why I always take a "before" selfie with my headlamp on when I start one of those jobs. My buddy Dave did a cable install back in 2018 and the customer's attic had old Christmas lights still plugged in from like 2009, tangled with coax and speaker wire, looked like a spiderweb of hot plastic waiting to happen. He sent me the photo and I swear it was the same vibe as those hoarder houses you see on TV, just with more dust and mouse droppings. I've learned to always take a junk food break halfway through those attic cleanups, otherwise my back starts screaming at me by the time I'm done lmao.
The spiderweb of hot plastic waiting to happen" - dude that's exactly what my friend Mark walked into last summer up in Waco. He was doing a crawlspace cleanup and found a tangle of old extension cords wrapped around PVC pipes that had melted together from some ancient space heater someone forgot about. @dakota160 I swear it looked like those Christmas lights your buddy Dave found, just a nightmare of melted plastic and dust bunnies. Mark texted me a photo and I could smell the burnt wire through the screen...