Fixing another man's lash-up!

This is a job I quoted for and won last Christmas, but I was subsequently unable to meet the client's schedule, so they booked in someone else, an old boy who has been in the business for donkey's years. For whatever reason, things went sour between them and they asked me to come and finish the job. Not something I would do ordinarily, but the lockdown opened a space in my diary which suited both parties and it was one I could go and do on my own.

At first glance, I thought things were pretty good, but subsequent inspection and testing turned up a few questionable things including an outright schoolboy error which I attempt to find and fix with as little damage as possible as decorative finishes have already started going in, and with some interesting materials that are tricky to work with.

Sometimes you'll get a 'rock and a hard place' job like this where you have a fault to locate and correct while working around finishes you don't want to damage. Everyone will have an opinion on whether I approached this one rightly or wrongly, but really that first-fix foul-up shouldn't have existed in the first place. Someone else did the deed, then failed to find it through dead testing before it got plastered over, and now I'm the guy inheriting the headache.

If you want to comment on how it could have been done better, then please do so, but keep it informative. If you think I'm wrong, tell me why and what you would have done instead. Oh, and yes, inaccessible junctions are permitted by BS7671 under certain conditions. Other countries don't allow such, so if you're a sparkie elsewhere in the world working to a different code, I'd be interested to hear what you'd have to do in a similar scenario. For more on inaccessible junctions in the UK, I refer you to this article on my website: https://www.dses.co.uk/index.php/free...

Personally, I'd have probably run the circuits at a high level in the 150mm prescribed zone by the ceiling and dropped down the walls to the accessory positions. I'd have also run it as two radial circuits, one for the kitchen, one for the living areas as I'm not a fan of rings.

There were some other issues on this site that weren't recorded on camera such as lighting points with no CPC, but I only filmed on my last day when I came to investigate the fault shown. I was there for three days, and they were long days too with early starts and late finishes just to get this fitted in and ticked off. That fibreboard stuff is, presumably, Sundeala board which has thermal and acoustic insulation properties and is fire rated. It was applied to the external walls and the internal paramount (eggbox) walls. I replaced the 25mm KO boxes for 35mm for a better fit.