Electrical Whoops

My Loving Spouse and I spent most of the day rewiring electrical that was done…hmmm, how shall I say…’poorly’.  I took one look at it, and said, “Whoops!”…even I knew it was ‘not good’.  I not only learned a lot about electrical wiring today, but I also learned a LOT of new words and I can repeat NONE of them, and here I thought the ‘Bad British’ word was fairly awful.  There is an electrician somewhere with his ears burning.  The thing about electrical is that ‘whoops’ is not a good word.

Many of the repairs meant we needed to work in the attic.  Working on electrical in the attic, is not too hard, as the electrical is all easy to see.  Well, it would be easy to see, if there were light, so holding the flash light was one of my jobs, along with being the Glorified ‘Go-fer’ or as My Loving Spouse calls it, ‘Step & Fetch It’.  Of course when we are working downstairs the tool we need is upstairs and then visa-versa, hence the need for the ‘Step & Fetch It’.   (This is not such a bad job on Sunday’s because it means that the ‘Stepper & Fetcher’ can stay abreast of the football scores each time they pass by the TV downstairs).  One of my other jobs is called ‘Keep My Loving Spouse From Falling Off Of The Wiggly Step Stool’.  As you can imagine, this is a very important job.  So far we only have one ‘whoa!’ and one other ‘phew!’ and no ‘whoops’.  He is a pretty big guy, so ‘whoops’ would really not be a good word.

Exposed electrical, such as we have in the attic, ought to be easy to work on, except, right now the attic has no real ‘floor’.  What one sees is the ceiling of the kitchen and this was not built to hold anyone..so in an effort to not fall through the ceiling into the kitchen, one must only walk balancing on the joists….all the time, this is a prime example of when saying ‘whoops’ would be really NOT good.

The attic and the kitchen below it were what we believe to be the second piece of ‘old house’ added to this old house, a practice that used to be common.  We have plans to make this space more ‘usable’, but needed to rip out the old floor first as the floor was nearly a foot higher than the other floors upstairs.  The attic is a fairly blank slate with only a bit of old wallpaper to show its age.

We remain ever optimistic.  Believing it would take us 2 hours to complete the electrical fixes today, we’d also planned to haul the 16 new floor joists 2x6x12 foot beams upstairs, as well as getting them installed.  Instead… we worked on electrical for 6 hours, put tools away for 1/2 hour, fed the animals for 1/2 hour, put football on, grabbed two beers and crashed.