Oh for a light

The following events might be humerous to some of you - to others, they might be aptly deemed tragic.

It's difficult to explain the impact of this event without some background, so here we go. I've mentioned before that when we first moved in, we had a lot of help. We had uncles and aunts and grandparents and parents painting and taking up carpet. They helped with many facets of repair to prep our house so it was livable. A few uncles took on the main floor bath, which is a room off of the kitchen. Now, I am unclear as to the actual events, but from memory, I recall that one uncle took down the light fixture so it could be cleaned. Some mishap occurred, and when he went to put in the new lightbulb, he flipped on the switch and it no longer worked. He tried it a few more times, and so did others involved. Since they could not figure out why it was not turning on, he removed the lightbulb and mentioned it to Phil and I.

For 10 months this fixture has sat, lightbulbless, for the day when it took high enough priority to be addressed. Now, in the interim, we have changed things around a bit. We took out the "bathroom stuff" and removed the carpet. When we needed the entire kitchen cleared out for its floor to be removed, we moved the sink cabinet into that back room - and it is now called the "sink room".

During the day, this was not a big deal. I was thankful to have running water and a connected drain (both of which had been absent prior to the cabinet move) and a little thing like a light just didn't bother me that much. But the newness of the connected drain and endless supply of running water wore off, and soon I found myself longing for the ability to do dishes in the evening hours without straining to see food particles in the faint light provided by the adjacent room. The dark hole that was my washroom started to grate on me. Slowly and surely, it was moving up the priority list.

But we were apprehensive. Phil knows how to do some wiring, but he didn't know how much work this little project would entail. With all of the other things on his own list, he pushed this item to the sideburner (ie. very rarely was he the one doing the dishes by candlelight).

Upon my parent's arrival for their latest visit, my mom asked if I wanted dad to try and fix the light in the sink room. Being that he is an electical engineer and has a bit of background with such things, I was confident he could figure out what was going wrong. I enthusiastically agreed and two days into his visit, he began to tackle the problem.

He first asked me for a lightbulb. I had one of those. He screwed it into the socket and asked which switch was supposed to operate that light. The one in the sink room, we discovered, was actually the light to the back porch. The switch that operated the sink room fixture was actually right outside the door, next to another kitchen light. Who, we wondered, would wire the room this way? It was awkward, strange. But, it was reality.

So, he tried the switch. And the light turned on. Yes, it simply turned on - and as bright light flooded the room, ten months of struggling to see in the darkness danced through my memory. I recalled all of those evenings when my "dish dryer" would pass back insufficiently washed dishes - a taunting "missed a spot" that could have been avoided with one simple action. A three minute trial and error session conducted by yours truly. But did I experiment? Tragic, I tell you.

In hindsight, though, we probably would have had a hole in the ceiling and the wiring strung throughout the room and power turned off to most of the house before we tried screwing that lightbulb in again. So, really, it was good that we had an experienced electrician address the issue.