Monday, November 12, 2012

Does this turn you on?

The main point of today's post is light switches and outlets (hence the title...).

It's been a while since I have blogged so I feel like I may have some catch up to do... My last post was October 30th! Time really does fly. The first weekend of November, I got absolutely no house work done. We went to a bonfire / "camping" event (we didn't stay the night so we don't really get credit for camping) on Saturday in rural Virginia, and I spent Sunday celebrating one of my close friend's birthday in Baltimore. It was a super fun weekend, but not at all productive. :) Then, last week passed in somewhat of a blur, with all the election excitement, which brings us to this past weekend. Saturday, I spent the day with my coworkers playing paintball. That was a new experience. I managed to keep myself from getting hit too much or too hard until the very last game we played. I was trying to hide out in the back and not get hit (which had overall worked for me as a strategy). Unfortunately, everyone else on my team got out, which meant it was just me. And I got shot, in the ribs, at close range. Ouch. My body's first reaction was to start crying uncontrollably in front of my coworkers. It really made the situation a lot better (Can you hear the sarcasm?). After paintball, I had planned on doing some house stuff, but I was absolutely beat.

Sunday, I finally got around to... more light switch and outlet exchanges! You're excited right? I actually meant to do that and painting, but the electrical work took way longer than expected. How long? Well, last night J had a dream that he woke up and his alarm clock didn't have power, and my alarm clock didn't have power. So, he came downstairs and I was standing there with a bunch of wires pulled out from the wall. In the dream, he asked me what time it was, and I replied that I didn't know, but I had been at it for hours. When your husband has dreams about you doing electrical work, you may have a problem.

First of all, I did NOT wire the 3-way switch correctly. I knew I didn't when I first did it, so I set about to correct the problem by buying a 3 way switch. I'm going to make a really long story of trying to figure out the 3-way switch short, by telling you that the white wire in the back of the box (that I assumed was not connected) was connected to the original switch. And needed to be connected to the new 3-way. Once that was accomplished, the switch worked. I'm embarrassed about how long figuring that out took. Stupid 3-way switches and making white a hot. If you are ever interested in 3-way switches, I would recommend: 

The difference between those links and my circuit was that whoever wired ours disregarded any sort of color scheme, which made it more difficult to figure out.

Also, I am getting new switch plates soon. So sick of these grody ones.

The simpler, but much more labor intensive switch outs are as follows...

Garbage disposal switch.
Before:
After:

Guest bedroom switch
Before:


Sitting room switch.
Before:
After:

Outlets in the master bedroom (6 in total, did not take pictures of all outlets). The cool thing about the new outlets is they have built in child protection (a piece of plastic over the individual slots), which is always nice in thinking ahead.
Before:

 After:


Now, in addition to my ribs, my fingers are sore. Reminds me of those old wire stripping and breadboard days back in college (don't worry about it if you didn't understand that sentence).

Anyway, that's all for now. I would like to replace the switch plates and then move on to more exciting projects. :)

No comments:

Post a Comment