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Yet more home repair
I had hope of the floors being finished today then, finally, I could spend the holiday weekend making this house a bit more like a home. What actually happened was, late yesterday, when I plugged the vacuum cleaner into an outlet near a part of floor I wanted to prepare for what was coming, it didn't come on. The outlet, which had previously been supplying lower-power devices, was now dead. The wiring for it seems fine but disappears off to goodness knows where. Roughly since then, screws in the cover plate of a nearby light-switch in another room are at 120V, plausibly the outlet was drawing power from that lighting circuit, though the lights still work and the switch seems to be wired just fine. The vacuum cleaner works fine elsewhere.
The electrical issue remained a puzzle today so, when they had to leave, I had the guy just open the breaker for the front lighting, I can live without it, and the efforts will continue on Monday. Maybe I will have my floors done by the middle of next week, not leaving much time for much else, because I want to be done with this round of work by New Year's Eve.
The electrical issue remained a puzzle today so, when they had to leave, I had the guy just open the breaker for the front lighting, I can live without it, and the efforts will continue on Monday. Maybe I will have my floors done by the middle of next week, not leaving much time for much else, because I want to be done with this round of work by New Year's Eve.
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My oven broke recently, I ordered a new element for it that I'll install when we get back home next week. I was discussing it online with a friend and mentioned unplugging it (I would normally just turn the breaker off but as I have to pull it out of its cabinetery niche it'll also get unplugged) and she told me about her or a friend getting zapped by an appliance where the breaker had been turned off but the circuit was still energized due to some "handyman" rectal haberdashery.
I trust my house to not have that problem as it's a manufactured house and does not show evidence of "I can do this!" home improvements, and I trust my dad's house of not having that as he retired as a very skilled plumber and knew what he was doing. I think if I ever buy another house, I'm going to make sure that I use one of those little circuit testers on the contract inspection!
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A lot of the electrical work has actually been better than most of the other work, even though it included wires wound under around the screwed tightened atop them, but with the insulation still on the end of the wire! Most of the crazy parts like that were toward the "ends", as if a competent person did the main stuff, and incompetent did the other. Though, there are strange finds, like yesterday we found an outlet wired with that yellow UV-resistant wire. Many other aspects of the house are of mixed character like that, mostly by incompetent person, including that they clearly first learned to tile here, you can see them improve from bathroom to bathroom. (Actually sealing more of the joints in the plumbing or securing more of the fittings would have been nice, sigh.)
There was so much hidden from the inspection, everything from rotten filled wood hidden behind fresh paint or metal flashing, etc., to that one of the upstairs windows actually had the roof resting on it - I had a structural window! (But it was a new window mounted into rotten wood so it'd have eventually fallen out.) I have spent so much money on getting myriad horrors fixed but the house just keeps on giving. (E.g., I've now had three patches of the "new" roof and the chimney leak fixed.) And that's before we get to the stuff I'm more able to handle myself, like the bags of trash buried in the back yard!
Curiously, the place has had money spent on it. I have some nice stuff, e.g., the hood above the stovetop has the charcoal filters, etc. (Of course, the vent initially just ended at the kitchen ceiling instead of going through a hole up further! Similarly, the bathroom extractor fans used to just blow up into the insulation.) There have been black mold, wasps, termites, carpenter bees, etc., all to deal with, but also some parts are done well, and not sparing expense. I really wonder if he started optimistically then, at some point, the money and time was just adding up so badly that he switched to just getting it sold as expediently as possible.
Basically, it's at the point where my competent handyman has circulated plenty of photos, of what's been uncovered, among his handyman friends who universally agree they've never seen anything like it before. I so much wish I'd documented it properly from the start, I'd probably have had quite a court case ready to go, but at no point did it seems like there was a lot left to do so I didn't keep good records.
What I don't understand is how the previous owner obviously tried to just cover over all kinds of serious issues so the inspector wouldn't notice, yet he left me his telephone number. I wonder what on Earth he expected that I might say. Certainly nothing polite.