In September of 2003, I persuaded a friend that we could wire his house far better in terms of features and less expensively than paying an electrician. So I became the project lead, though he quicky had his fingers around the whole process.
One Saturday, we got a lot of guys from work, plus friends and family, and really “went to town” on the rough electricity, the worst of which was the myriad cans. Boy, you just don’t want to screw up the wiring of cans. Some fussing was required, but was done before the sheet rock went up.
Most of this is detailed here with a few pictures of the rather substantial house.
Another, a bunch of us left work at Novell and went down at lunch to do all the home runs. This saved a huge amount of time crawling up in the rafters, getting down, crawling back up, etc. as we had guys stationed all over inside the timbers of the huge roof. We ran all the cables through sleeves of ABS I cut specially for the project to make it a little better organized. As each home run was completed, the originator called out what it was for and I scrawled details on the ends of the cables just before the breaker panel.
A day later, I carefully ran all the home runs into the breaker panel and did nearly as neat a job as I could do plus documenting the details for after the sheet rock would go up.
The inspector passed the rough electricity the first time except for a couple of boxes the plumber had pulled out to make one of his runs.
We came back a few more times to make the finish connections, especially the three-way switches. Some trouble was had getting the outside front GFI outlets, but in the end, no runs had been missed and a great sigh was heard.
 Here’s Bullhead ranch coming up on the right! |  Sure is nice digs—whoa, it’s going by... |  Yup missed the turn altogether. |
 Okay, turn around and go back. |  The forest of stud trees bearing the poisonous blue-box fruit. |  The cavernous great room, scene of the Jeff and Brandon high-wire act. |
 Cans, cans, we’re sick of cans. |  The home runs are done... |  ...ready for power! |