Electrifying Goodness

No big updates recently; our jobs and my exhaustion have kinda kept us from doing much around the house on the big projects (or from blogging about them). This week, we did have our next-door-neighbor, Lisa, the licenced electrician come by to fix some stuff for us. She has been great!
She re-installed the lighting fixtures in the baby's room, including the overhead light in the main room


and in the closet.

Let there be light! She also dealt with the electrical cord that was sticking out inside the built-in, as you can see in this before and after pair:


































We also had a new problem -- the one outlet on the front wall of our bedroom blew a month or so ago. It was the one we used to power our bedside lamps, alarm clocks, and the air conditioner (perhaps that's why it blew). It wasn't just a fuse or circuit-breaker issue; it seems that it was one of the outlets with older wiring, and somewhere along the line, the wire fried. Lisa couldn't find the specific spot (without, say, ripping apart all of the walls) so we decided to cover that outlet completely and have two brand new ones installed.
Here's the old one, covered up:

And here's one of the new ones:

These are heavy-duty receptacles, with 20-amp (instead of only 15-amp) service, so we're good to go for plugging in all our power tools and air conditioners and whatnot.

Putting in the new ones involved a lot of fancy professional electrician kinda stuff, so we were very pleased to have an expert. She set things up and strung new wires from the basement, up through the wall by the chimney, overhead through the attic, and then into nice new heavy-duty outlets in the bedroom (one for each side of the bed). It's great, and now we don't have to worry about plugging in the air conditioner. [On a side note, I cannot believe that we still need an air conditioner in October in Massachusetts!]

While in the basement, Lisa showed Jake some of the fascinating wiring in our house. Most of it is more recent, and all of it looked safe to her, but it's really quite the wiring museum down there. Jake has some pictures, and he can probably elaborate further on our little piece of electrical history.



Other than that, we need to get back to finishing the baby's room; that's on the list for next week. Jake has primed all the trim, and also painted the ceiling with the ceiling white color (it has a name, but I forget what it is. Weirdly, it's not just "white.") The room is looking a bit creepy right now, with white on every surface. It's like some weird optical illusion: