Week 2: Adventures with electricity

Task # 3: Interior Painting Prep

Note to all homeowners: when painting your walls, you should remove all fixtures and nails/screws.  Not only does it look unprofessional and tacky, but it's also a huge pain to remove them if they are painted over (such as the curtain fixture pictured here).  Don't get lazy and skip this step.  It will look much better if you don't have paint gooped up on the nails.

We had to use a flat metal scraper to break the paint sealing the outlet covers to the wall.  Since the outlets themselves were painted over, it was tricky to remove the plates.  With one particular plate, Matt pulled a little too hard when the outlets were still attached to the plate.  A huge spark coming from the outlet and half the lights in the house going out indicated that this was probably not a smart idea.  Since we still needed to get the outlet covers off, Matt developed a new technique where he used the scraper to pull at the cover while simultaneously using a hammer to insure the socket was staying in the wall. (Note: We turned off all the power to the outlets before trying again.) 

At least this caused us to learn about how to use the fuse box (old school style).  The house doesn't have a circuit breaker, but instead a box with actual fuses (yes, they still sell fuses).  All we needed was another trip to Home Depot (our new favorite store) and a quick internet search to repair the blown fuse.  The lights are back on again, but we eventually need to call an electrician to replace the box with a circuit breaker.