08:36 Friday, August 08 2008

home improvement

i had a lovely evening last night. the drywall contractor finished redoing the walls in the kitchen yesterday but as a result of the walls now being about a half inch thicker than before all the electrical sockets need(ed) to get spacers so that the faceplates would screw on properly. so yesterday evening Denise is attempting to do that when she noticed that the light in the fridge isn't working (because it had no power). Then we notice that half the house no longer has power. While we're trying to figure out the extent of the outage, my wife gets a nasty shock off of the garbage disposal switch in the kitchen. Six hours and \$500 later, its all fixed. We learned that the wiring in one of the kithen sockets was done blatantly wrong and came lose when we were reseating the socket. It then short circuited, touching the neutral to ground which is likely why the garbage disposal switch was suddenly 'live'. Also, the idiots who wired the house had the GFCI sockets in the garage in series with the kitchen cirtcuit which is both stupid & a code violation. So when we went to look at the circuit panel to see which one got tripped, they all looked to be ok because the GFCI socket in the garage got tripped instead and we never thought to look at that.