Day 20 – What Irritates You About The Home You Live In?

note: this is part of #bloganuary where each day in the month of January, there is a prompt that we can write on.

Dawn and I have lived in our home for 23 plus years. In that time, we have taken on quite a few projects as we update and remodel. A couple years ago, we focused our energy on outside projects, hardscaping, lighting, and what Dawn is really good at, using flowers to beautify Thompsonville.

We are the third owners of the home, each owner adding their own personal touch and improvement project. I am a big supporter of individuals working on their own homes. There is an incredible amount of pride and cost savings in making improvements to your own home. There is potentially a big problem with homeowners taking on their own home improvement projects:

Many of them have no business taking on home improvement projects!

This brings me to the thing that irritates me the most in our house, the electric. See, somewhere along the line, one of the two previous owners thought they would just save some money and add a crap ton of lights to the home. Well, they had no idea what they were doing, cutting off and eliminating the ground wires of many of the fixtures. Tapping into existing to add a new fixture. Or cutting off wires, leaving them hot, and then covering them with wood trim.

The lack of ground wires overloaded the circuit and caused breakers to trip and we recently had to the have the main panel replaced due to years of bad wiring. A previous owner, incorrectly tapping into an existing bathroom switch caused me physical pain. I had disabled the electric that I could trace and thought that I had ensured that it was safe for me to work. And yet, buried somewhere in the box was a hot wire that zapped me. A shooting pain and a ton of swear words about the previous owner were my outlet. I also had to hire and pay an electrician several hundred dollars in order to fix that particular issue.

Finally, Dawn and I were doing some demo in the basement to prepare for a new entertainment area. In removing some of the existing flooring, I was removing a piece of base molding and there was a wire, in the molding, that was still wired to the main panel. A fire that thankfully never happened.

A repeat of the swear words directed towards the previous owner may or may not have streamed for several elevated minutes once more.

I believe that over the past several years, we have found and corrected the electrical issues within our home and we are safer. What irritates me about our home has hopefully been completely eliminated and for the remainder of our time here and for future owners, it is a safer place for memories to be made.

Happy Friday y’all,

t.t.