Wacky Wiring, Fabulous Friends

It's inevitable that a house built in the 1950s is going to have some electrical quirks. Old wiring plus years of owners jerry-rigging new outlets and switches are bound to cause some headaches. Our first clue that something wasn't right in the extra bedroom was last year when we were getting insulation blown into the attic and have to call in an electrician to find a splice before we sealed everything up. The electrician stopped the problem but told us to throw out the lamp and light switch, since they were old and partly causing the problems. So for over a year we had an electrical box with capped wires poking out from the ceiling. It was a mostly unused room and when I worked in there to refinish furniture, I just brought in a standing lamp. Recently we decided to refinance and decided that we had to get a lamp up there before the appraiser came to judge us (the refinance itself is another story for another time). We took for granted that everything was in working order and all we needed to do was to install a new lamp. We had plenty of practice at this, like in our dining room, bathroom, and bedroom.

We had a cute little sun lamp, Smila Sol, from Ikea (yes, it's a kid's lamp, so what?) and it was pretty straightforward to install, though, as usual, it's more of a two-person job than something to do alone. We got it ready to go, put the bulbs in, switched the circuit back on and....

Nada. No light at all. We realized then that we'd never tested the electricity with a volt meter before assembling everything. Back down goes the lamp and off went the circuit and then we took a good look at the wiring in the box. We noticed a lot of stuff that didn't look right, even to the amateurs we are. Whites to blacks in several places, all crammed into a tiny box that we thought only controlled one measly light. Our volt meter read 6 volts with the circuit on (6?!). We were stumped.

Time to call in the professionals. Or actually, time to email the above picture to our dear friend, who is also a trained electrician. He's made an appearance in our blog before so let's finally name him, P. Being the kind person he is and realizing that we were working on a deadline, P and his wife L came over that very afternoon to help.

The proceedings were pretty much over my head (literally and figuratively) but it basically turned out that the wiring in our house is totally screwed up and some of the power was going down to the mystery switch in the hallway. Once P put the black wires and white wires in the right pairings, he noticed that when the switch was on, the breaker would get tripped. It seems that someone without a good understanding of electricity put a switch to the bedroom down at the bottom of the stairwell.

P worked some more magic, deactivated the mystery switch, and somehow got our light to work. Pretty glowing sun! And, more importantly, a room that could actually contribute to the value of our house, rather than look like a work in progress.

While D and P were playing with electricity, L and I was outside spreading compost on the lawn, finally using up a pile of a cubic yard that we had delivered months ago and gaining full use of our driveway again. Where would we be without good friends?! In the dark and stuck with a pile of compost in the driveway, that's where.