Adventures in Remodeling

This is one for the books....

A few weeks ago, the night after the sheetrockers had hung all the drywall, my dad was here and went downstairs to check it out. I heard him struggling to move stuff around down there, and thought he was trying to clean up after them. I shouted down to him, and told him he didn't need to worry about it. Well, that wasn't exactly the case. Apparently the little deep freeze we have down there had gotten unplugged when they hung all the drywall and my dad was moving it over to the only plug he could see, which my furnace also happens to be plugged into.

He asked me to go turn off the air. He unplugged the furnace, plugged in the freezer, then plugged the furnace back in. Freezer was working, and everything seemed fine. Until... we're back upstairs, and realize the compressor on my air conditioner isn't working. This has happened before, and Dad was headed out back to wiggle the thingy (technical, I know) to turn it back on. Knowing he probably wasn't sure what thingy to wiggle, I told him I would do it (even though I was trying to get out the door to go to the Old Ladies that night). Well, the magic wiggle wasn't going to work this time. No A/C. We thought it might be a breaker, so I ran up and down the stairs, in and out of the house testing all the breakers and wiggling thingys all around, and nothing was working. "Oh well" I thought - we'll just call an HVAC guy tomorrow to come fix it. I had wanted to get my furnace serviced anyway. We can live without A/C one night.

So, the next morning, I called a HVAC guy, and made an appointment for him to come the next day. Problems solved. Until... I was making dinner that night. Had a nice chicken and potato dish ready to go into the oven when I realize that my oven that had been "preheating" was dead. No power whatsoever. Hmmm... not good. I'm debating on what to do, when I hear Tessa grunting and groaning in the living room - sure enough - blow out! I went to change her and knew I had some clean clothes for her in the dryer, so I grabbed them, and discovered that the laundry I had put in there that morning didn't dry. I tried to start the dryer - dead. Not good....

I decided I definitely needed to call my electrician to see if he could help me out. In the meantime, Lily decides it's time for a fit. I got my electrician on the phone and amidst Lily's screaming, he said I should go try the main breaker for the house. I made sure with him I wouldn't electrocute myself by flipping that breaker, and gave it a shot. No luck - everything was still dead. Lily was still screaming, only now Dad informed me that the cable went out. Great.... I was ready to start crying right along with Lily!

Trying to solve one crisis at a time, I got Lily calmed down with some "juuk" (i.e. juice), got Comcast on the phone to reset our cable, wrapped up my chicken & potatoes and put them in the fridge (at least that was still working), and made an appointment with our electrician for the next day to come see what was wrong.

Bob the electrician showed up the next evening, went downstairs to the breaker panel, flipped all my 220 amp breakers back and sure enough stove works, dryer works, A/C works. Can you believe that's all it was??? I guess in all of the crazy breaker flipping the first time when the A/C went out, we ended up shutting them all off instead of on. Nice.

In my own defense, it IS a new breaker panel, and nothing was labeled, and it IS mighty hard to tell which way is on and which is off....

What a joke!