Yet more home repair

[mtbc]

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.

Comments

[mindstalk]

cursed

[muninnhuginn]

How irritating.

[thewayne]

Eeeek! That sounds very bad! Sounds like "Trust me, I know what I'm doing!" happened.

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!