Owning your first home, electrical – Life lesson 3

We bought our first home 2 years ago and it has been full of surprises. About 2 weeks in I asked my husband where the owner’s manual was! We lived in an apartment prior to buying the house so it was a BIG adjustment. It’s funny when you think about the fact that we both grew up in the suburbs in houses with our parents but since your parents don’t typically consult you when a pipe bursts or ask you to check the pilot light on the burner when the heat goes out….we went into the homeowner experience completely unprepared and to be honest at times it is pretty comical! It was funny when we tried repeatedly to paint the ceiling in the master bedroom and it kept peeling and falling on us. It was funny when we called an electrician because our power went out on one side of the house and it was the circuit breaker! Nooooo we are not that dumb but it turned out we did check the breaker box but didn’t realize they could look on but could go another millimeter and fix it. So we paid for a service call for some guy to flip a switch! So needless to say I am going to have a lot of blogs about owning a home and how to prepare and fix the crap that tends to happen.
My first story is about our electrical………it was our child’s christening and we were all getting ready that morning to go to church. It was a mess, my hair was wet, the baby was still in her pajamas and our parents and siblings arrived early to take pictures. No pictures could be had until my husband steamed his shirt (we used a steamer because I have no idea how to iron and we found this to be the solution) and I blew dry my hair and got the baby dressed. Well steaming a shirt and running a blow dryer at the same time on the same circuit is a baaaddd idea! Fuse blew and with all the brains in the house we thought the breaker was flipped correctly. So we went through the morning checking all of the outlets, all of the reset switch outlets inside and outside. Nothing. So we went through the day, the party (50 people at the house) and the next week with no power in the bedrooms. We had extension cords running all over the place. Ridiculous. When the electrician came and showed us the “soft” switch we almost cried thinking of the time we spent flowing extension cords all over the place! Lesson learned. Turned out it was a blessing since while he (electrician) was here we had him evaluate our pool electric system and he found it was not properly grounded!!!! Ouch! That is so dangerous!!! And yes we trusted him, he was not finding work in other places since we knew him……but we got that fixed ASAP. So the way I look at it things happen for a reason and though we did not have a house problem we had a pool issue. He also installed in the bathroom, kitchen and bedrooms outlets that had reset switches. Real lesson here, our house inspector sucked. Life lesson, don’t just get a house inspection by a general inspector…..get a REAL electrician in to inspect your potential home because you can use that in the negotiation process and avoid a $1000 bill. Another tip, get a power surge protector for your computer. We have had electrical issues affect our computer and we almost lost our data. Not a big investment but sooooo worth it! Till next time :-)