We did, however, get one thing done this month that I've been meaning to post about for two weeks -- electrical work!
The system was upgraded from a fuse box to modern circuit breakers by a licensed electrician in 2007, but the entire back of the house -- the kitchen, Adrienne's office, the sun porch, & one of the outlets in the bedroom -- was on just one circuit. Already a less than ideal situation. Then, Mr. Bunkport had to monkey with the system when he rebuilt the structure under Adrienne's office so that the refrigerator would still run while they were working -- he's a licensed contractor & knows what he's doing...but let's face it: he's not an electrician, and things were not quite right back there after he finished. He came back twice, and couldn't figure out what the problem was, but things seemed to be fine when we just left everything unplugged. We figured we save energy that way anyway, so let's just sit tight, continue to save our money, & then get an electrician in when we go to redo the back of the house, since we'll want to have more circuits added at that time anyway. This sounds ridiculous as I'm typing this (hello, fires?), but it made sense at the time.
Then in mid-August, things started acting funny again, so we decided to just bite the bullet & bring an electrician in to tell us what is going on. I got a referral from our friend Amanda, who works for our Realtor® & knows all the best tradesmen. Our Realtor® is herself a landlord, so in addition to referrals, she sends a lot of work to these folks herself. And they all know that if she catches wind of a client done wrong, that's the end of the line, so that's a level of assurance for us.
He came right over, & confirmed that sure enough, that one circuit is overloaded, & also general contractors, while super at building things, don't always make great decisions with rewiring. He suggested adding 2 more circuits to the house to solve both problems, but also said that if we wanted to wait until we redo the back of the house, that would be ok as long as we were careful about how much we were plugging in at one time.
Then, the next morning, he called me back. He said that he was talking about the house the night before, had decided that there was actually a safety issue here, & to encourage us to get the work done now, he offered to knock 25% off the price he had quoted me. He also offered to come do the work the next day. Sounds scammy, but this guy is not at all hurting for work, and he comes to us from the very best source possible, so we agreed. Better safe than sorry, & that discount really helped take the sting out.
The next morning, he came at 9am, with his wife Connie in tow. At one point during the day, I said to her that this seems like interesting work. She answered that she thinks it's horribly boring, but Samson was worried about us, & had asked her to come help him so that he could bring the cost down, instead of his having to pay his usual guys for their labor.
Also, when he was leaving at 4:30pm (!), he told me that our Realtor® had called him after we'd already agreed on the discounted cost, & asked him to knock the price down further to help us out -- he said that he couldn't cut the price more, but instead installed a third circuit & replaced our counter-top kitchen outlets with those circuit-breaking safety outlets for no charge.
So, now, not only are we sitting in a safer house, we're actually all set up for a kitchen remodel that we'll hopefully do in 5 or 6 years. Another happy ending on Mars!
Here are our brand new circuit breakers (the ones with the black marker):
And here are our new outlets.
Tomorrow, we are going to start finishing & painting Adrienne's office, so stay tuned for more posts this week!
Yay! Samson to the rescue!
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