Buried junction boxes - yes or no?
Doing some renevations in our basement, which has included a significant rewiring of circuits and replacement of the circuit breaker box with a larger one capable of handling the increased number of circuits for a proper layout of exercise equipment - all done by a professional electrician. The old wiring in the basement was a mess - branch circuits running every which way, splices in strange places, etc. Now we've got it all cleaned up, but unfortunately ended up with 5 junction boxes that are mounted up in the joists. These boxes were installed by our electrician up in the joists so that after sheet rocking the ceiling they're effectively "buried." He says that the inspector will require some sort of access to these junctions - and I do understand that that's what the code says. My question is: why? Who cares if the junctions are buried or not? There's no routine maintenance that one ever does on junction boxes, and if we ever wanted to make changes or additions to circuits we'd have to open up the ceiling regardless. So what's the rationale for requiring access? We're going to have to cut access panels of into the sheetrock, which will be a mess and look ugly. Meanwhile our contractor who's done all the framing and sheetrocking suggests that if we just leave them buried as they are no one would be the wiser - the inspector who originally passed us on the rough wiring will probably not remember that those junctions are up there. Thoughts?
