Prepping house for rewire, what are the must-dos?

[FooOOOOoooofffffff]

Just that really. We finally have a date in January booked and will be moving out for 2 weeks to give spark, plasterer and decorator time to do their thing. This is my list so far and a couple of questions at the end, am I missing anything?

1. Pack up or throw away anything that is not a major item of furniture and arrange storage.
2. Take down curtains and get them dry-cleaned. Remove wooden blinds and clean them.
3. Choose and buy new light fittings for bathroom, hall and lounge.

4 ?Should I completely remove the wallpaper/lining paper before they raggle the walls? Will the plasterer skim an entire wall or just do a patch?

1. ?We have carpeting upstairs and the wiring currently runs underneath it. Should we have this taken up and stored or leave it for the sparks to work around?

Any advice would be great. This is such an upheaval but I want to get the house right.

[FoosBitch]

Thanks @filka, I'll look into the usb thing. It might be that extra sockets are more useful anyway so I'll add in another easily accessible socket to each room.
Our electrician is fully qualified and will give us certification at the end of it. We're not going to move the sockets to regulation height but they are in the baseboards at the moment so we're bringing them up to at least knee height.

[TheSandman]

I don't think I have ever been gladder that my house is built with floating lath and plaster / and plasterboard walls like so many other old Scottish houses.

Wires can be pulled, dropped down. or poked up the gap between the internal wall and the external stone wall with a minimum of faff. It's not always that easy - sometimes wire get snagged, or coil up in interesting places en route - but nothing like the mess you guys are describing.

A few years ago my FIL (an electrician, English, and used to hard plastered walls) nearly had a fit when my wife and I decided we had made a mistake on the new fit wiring he had done and we needed another switch for the kitchen light - turning a two way into a three way. This involved running cables up into the attic (the kitchen ceiling is open to the floorboards of the upstairs - so all wiring has to go stupidly long distances to keep it hidden)... up one side of the building and back down the other.

Took us a couple of hours.

I don't recall having to take out any plasterboard upstairs. We used existing cables as pull-throughs and planned ahead.

[Jem01]

Will your electrician be using a wall chasing machine and if so will you use a dust extractor system?

Ours did and this helped a lot with the dust. We also made sure they did room by room so we could move around without the dust affecting us too much.

Of course tidying up as they move around helps. Henry the Hoover is the best Hoover ever for dust!

[FoosBitch]

I'm in Scotland Sandman and I wish our walls were like yours. Judging from our neighbours rewire a few years ago our walls are the sturdiest and trickiest that electrician had ever seen.
Jem01 I have no idea what kind of machinery they will be using but we will be moved out for the duration so the day to day dust won't bother us. I'm going to buy a henry hoover type vac for them to use and will remove our Dyson so they don't ruin it.
I still don't know whether we should lift the bedroom carpets ourselves and take them away to storage or just leave them. If the dust is so horrendous won't they get ruined? It's only about 3 years old so still quite nice and new.

[FoosBitch]

Hello again,
I'm resurrecting this thread to see if anyone has any more advice. I've been looking everywhere on the internet but can't seem to find anything.

1. Some of the wallpaper/lining paper on our walls is coming off due to condensation damp which I will remove before the rewire. Should I remove all the paper in the house at the same time? Will it make it easier to decorate?
   

1. Should I pull up the carpet and put it into storage with the rest of our stuff or leave it for the sparks to pull up? Will it get ruined if we leave it?

[FoosBitch]

Anyone?