Every Circuit Replaced, One Room at a Time

Cotati houses hide their wiring in layers

A rewire starts by working out what is actually in the walls, and around here that is a question about vintage. The oldest houses near the plaza can still hold knob and tube in the ceilings with newer circuits spliced into it. The post-war streets are mostly early cloth-sheathed cable, brittle at the terminations and short on ground. The later subdivisions run ungrounded two-wire that tested fine for decades and now feeds a house full of electronics. Each one is a different job, and the walk-through decides which.

The oldest stock can still have knob and tube in it, usually not the whole system anymore but remnants: a run to an upstairs bedroom that nobody ever traced, feeding an outlet somebody added decades later. More common across town is the ungrounded two-prong circuit. The wire is fine, the boxes are fine, but there is no ground path anywhere in the branch, which is why half the outlets in the house take a three-prong adapter and none of your surge strips are actually doing what the packaging says.

Then there is early NM cable with a cloth jacket, which reads as modern wiring right up until you touch it and the jacket comes off in flakes. And in a specific vintage, roughly the late 1960s through the mid 1970s, some houses got aluminum for the small branch circuits. None of this means your house is dangerous today. It means the system was sized for a different life than the one being lived in it now.

What a whole-house scope actually covers

A whole-house rewire replaces the branch wiring throughout, not one problem circuit. Every run from the panel out to the devices comes new, grounded, and sized for what that room does. Old conductors get pulled where they can be pulled and properly abandoned where they cannot, so nothing dead is left energized and nothing live is left unlabeled.

That is a different conversation than adding capacity or chasing a single fault, and the two often travel together. If the question is whether the service can carry the house, that is a panel upgrade question. If it is one hungry appliance that keeps tripping something, that is a dedicated circuit. And if you do not yet know which of those you are looking at, an electrical safety inspection answers it in writing before anybody opens a wall.

• All branch circuits replaced with new grounded copper
• Knob and tube remnants traced, removed, or safely abandoned
• Brittle cloth-jacketed conductors pulled out of service
• Aluminum branch wiring addressed on its own terms
• Arc-fault and ground-fault protection where code calls for it
• Permit pulled, rough and final inspection scheduled and met

Openings, patching, and what the walls look like after

Rewiring a finished house means cutting into it. The honest version is that there will be openings, and the craft is in where they land and how few of them there are. We place cuts low on a wall, behind where furniture sits, inside closets, above a baseboard that can come off and go back. Original trim, casings, and any picture rail stay put. We would rather spend the extra hour with a fish tape than pull a piece of old redwood nobody can match.

Every opening we make, we close and patch, sanded and ready for paint. We do not paint the room, and we say so up front, because matching an existing wall color is a painter’s job and a well-meant touch-up usually looks worse than an honest patch. Before we start, you get told where the openings are going to be, so the finished result is something you already agreed to rather than something you discover.

Permits, inspection, and the record that stays with the house

Rewiring is permitted work, and we pull the permit rather than leaving it to you. The rough inspection has to happen while the walls are still open, which is the real reason a rewire gets scheduled instead of improvised. The final comes once devices, covers, and protection are in. You keep the signed record, and that record is what a buyer’s agent asks for later and what an insurer wants on file. Sonoma County has learned the hard way that electrical documentation matters, and unpermitted work stays invisible right up until the day it costs you something. See finished work in our gallery, or tell us about your house.