Near Death Experience

Sorry for the major delay in posting.  Things have been complex at our home this week (I’ll explain a lot of it in later blog posts…).  Thanks for understanding.

You know, sometimes things happen that just make you go, “Well, duh!!!”  Let’s take a look at last Saturday.

For the last two weeks, our house has been in a constant state of upheaval.  We have been re-arranging our children’s bedrooms which have created quite a few unique situations.

We learned that Olivia really likes to climb as high as she can on anything she can find and then jump or slide down.  We knew that she liked to jump on the furniture and climb on the back of the couches, but we really didn’t comprehend that she liked to climb high enough to touch the ceiling and then jump... 

We’ve learned that even though Savannah thought it would be “Great!” to share a room with her little sister, the harsh realities of having a constant, younger, respecter-of-no-persons “stuff” companion wasn’t really all that she thought it would be.  (It’ll get better Princess, I promise).

Another thing we learned was that moving the sewing room from the basement to the attic really is a lot more work than we thought it would be.  (Thank you Thomas’s for all the help!)

But the one thing that I learned from this wasn’t really anything new.  It was something that I was taught back in high school by Mr. Baron.  You see, I took every electronics class that was offered at Provo High.  I was even a TA during my senior year for the digital electronics class.  And the summer after I finished high school I wired my parents new tool shed by following the directions Mr. Baron gave me.  All-in-all you could say that I really knew better than to do what I did.

With the sewing room being moved up to the attic, we had a room freed up in our basement for our oldest son Eric.  The biggest problem with the move, however, was the electrical outlets in his room.  Our home used to be owned by my Grandparents.  When the room in question was built, my Grandfather wired it to the latest code – a two prong outlet in a metal outlet box that has a ground wire attached to it.  Needless to say, my son’s stereo needed a three prong outlet.  Go figure.  So, we were smart enough to go to the breaker box and flip the breaker to the sewing room.  The lights went out as well as both outlets that I had already switched out on a previous occasion.  Now that the power was off, I proceeded to start switching out the outlet.  I undid the screw holding the cover plate and followed that with the two screws holding the outlet in the box.  I pulled out the receptacle and undid the two screws holding the wires on its’ sides.  Everything seemed to be going as planned as I started to reattach the wires to the new three pronged receptacle – that is until the loud pop and huge flash of light occurred.

You know, living in an old house is a marvelous thing – especially if you know the history of it.  The room that I was working in was part of the third and final addition onto the house (our living room is the original house my Grandparents purchased, but that’s another story that I’ll have to tell some other time…).  I made the classic mistake of assuming – I know, I know, what was I thinking – that everything in the room was on the same breaker.  Turns out that all the electrical in the wall I was working on is actually part of the bathroom breaker.  Now that was something that would have been nice to know in advance.

So, now that the real breaker was flipped, I finished replacing the outlet receptacle and everything was back up and running.  And what was the lesson that Mr. Baron taught me all those years ago that flashed through my mind during that split second flash and pop?  Always have something plugged into the outlet you are working on so that you will know that the electricity is actually turned off when the breaker is flipped.  I even heard Mr. Baron say it.

It seems that the simple, yet usually most important, lessons are always the ones we tend to forget until when they would have helped the most.