As part of their Renovation Road Trip extravaganza, I got a visit from Chris and Meryl of Picardy Project.
Meryl and I have known each other for about a year online but had never
met in person. That always makes me nervous, so I obsessed over the
state of the house in the days leading up to their visit. You’d think
that would mean I would attempt to fix or hide my shoddier work but my
brain went into stupid mode and said “YOU SHOULD BUY AN ENORMOUS PLANT.”
So
instead of buying renovation supplies to make their work go faster, I
bought a new plant. Because you know Chris and Meryl would walk into the
house and immediately judge that my air isn’t pure enough. I found a
bamboo palm (Chamaedorea seifrizii) at Ikea, which is one of the top plants for removing toxins from your home.
Oh
my god, what am I talking about? Sorry, I’m so sleepy today. Anyway,
Meryl and Chris showed up and it was immediately like we’d known each
other forever. I highly recommend letting them in, should they ever
arrive on your doorstep.
I didn’t have any major
projects for them to help with; instead I had a long “homeowner fatigue”
list of things I could probably do myself but I’m tired and a little
worried I’ll do it wrong, and also there’s a new episode of Revenge on
the Tivo and those cookies won’t eat themselves in bed.
First up: that hideous light fixture over the kitchen sink. This is what it looked like right after I moved in.
I took it down halfway when I painted the kitchen
and the wiring looked strange to me. Chris took down the fixture and
confirmed that, nope, everything in there was pretty normal. I felt
really silly. I’d spent all this time with an ugly light when my wiring
was totally normal! He got the fixture, an old piece I bought on
craigslist three and a half years ago, rewired and hung up in less than
an hour.
I’ve been wanting to repaint the kitchen, so this should be just the motivation I need.
Next
we moved to the living room, where I was pretty sure there was an
electrical box in the center of the ceiling, hiding beneath a spot where
the plaster looked a little different. Chris climbed up into the attic,
confirmed that there was indeed a box there, then carefully excavated
the box and revealed the wires.
You
know how normally when you hire an electrician or a plumber they’ll use
a sledgehammer to open a tiny hole in the wall? And then they’ll leave
dirty fingerprints everywhere, necessitating touch-up painting and a ton
of patchwork? Chris and Meryl don’t do that. There are tarps and
careful placement of hands and no additional patching or painting
required.
You
remember how my wiring in the kitchen was supposed to be weird but it
was just fine? Well, ha ha Chris, I TOLD YOU MY WIRING WAS JACKED. This
is where everything got a little frustrating. For Chris, that is.
Electrical is his gig, so Meryl handed him tools and assisted with
testing while I braided Meryl’s hair and tried to convince her to move
to Portland. I was useless. The rest of the day was mostly Chris
wandering from ladder to outlet to attic to ladder muttering, “This just
isn’t right.”
 |
| Greetings from the attic. |
It
turns out there is an extra wire in the ceiling box. A whole bunch of weird
stuff runs to here and we can’t tell if the light that used to be here
ever had a switch hooked to it. Despite digging around in the insulation
in the attic and chasing wires, we just couldn’t figure it out.
We
decided to leave it for a professional electrician, one who we can pay
to swim around in the attic insulation. Chris recommended installing a
new switch and running brand new wire to the box. I asked him if he’d
cut the switch box hole for me, because I didn’t want an electrician to
do it. I don’t want to patch and paint this room again.
So
he made me a perfect one. Then he and Meryl spent the rest of the
afternoon in a shame spiral, convinced that they had failed because they
hadn’t magically fixed the fact that my entire house is wired
imperfectly. There was a rush to fix anything else I could throw at
them.
Shaky bathroom vanity? It’s properly anchored to the wall now.
Strike plate that would fall out of the door jamb because the screws were stripped and the holes were way too big?
The holes were filled with toothpicks (a This Old House trick), then four-inch screws were driven in. The strike plate doesn’t fall out anymore and it will make it much more difficult for someone to kick in the door.
All the sticky parts were lubricated and weatherstripping was put up. It was like Christmas but without your drunk aunt saying something shitty to you.
Please come back, Meryl and Chris, because I’ve thought of 600 more things I need help with. I promise none of them are electrical.
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