The Ol’ Switcheroo

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Here’s a simple concept.

Light switch goes up, light goes on. Light switch goes down, light goes off.

Not so in the UD House.

Until recently, all three of my upstairs bedrooms have had ceiling fans (ugly ones, of course) that required a pull cord to turn the light on and off. The switch next to the doorway is just to psych you out every. single. time. you walk into the room. My lifelong habit of flipping a light switch when entering a dark room still happens in this house even when I know nothing will come of it.

In truth, the light switch actually works on the outlet that’s on the same wall as the switch, but this has been one of the more irksome things about my house ever since I moved in. Mostly because it means that if I were to choose something that is not a ceiling fan, there would be no way to turn the light on.

Thanks to the superhero handy man’s recent visit, all of that has changed. Since I don’t have light fixtures picked out just yet, we instead purchased super cheap placeholders so I can at least see the change. Now, when I walk into the bedroom, light switch goes up… light goes on! The only repair needed is sanding down and painting over the patch in the wall where he had to access the wires.

Also, according to my uncle, we did this just in time. When a light fixture is first installed into the ceiling of a house, the builder is supposed to put in an electrical box and support it so that the wires do not touch the drywall (it’s quite the fire hazard, so I’ve been told). For the craft room and guest bedroom, this was done. However, it seems that the builder conveniently forgot to install it in our primary. I don’t mean that it was missing; I mean that it was sitting there in our attic just above the bedroom ceiling and was simply never installed. For 28 years. As a result, the big, heavy ceiling fan that we’ve been using for the last 10 months (and the previous owners as well) has just been dangling by the wire that powered it. Resting on the drywall. We are very lucky.

Corner cutting. It’s simple things like this that make me certain that people in general are completely bonkers… oh, and also lazy. And sadly, it’s not the first time I’ve seen evidence of it in this house (check out this post about replacing our stair tread).

So, now I turn it over to all of you. There are tons of stories out in blogland of crazy “remuddling” and builder blunders. One that comes to mind is Chelsea at This Fresh Fossil’s closet-no-wait-thats-a-shower discovery. What is your favorite?