This Old House

Let me begin with this intro: I love my husband. I swear I do. I love him dearly. But he is just not Tim the Tool Man Taylor. Nor does he come close sometimes.

Around 7:30 PM tonight, he retreated down into the basement, which we are in the lengthy process of finishing. So, drywalling the ceilings is one of the things we are in the midst of. Well, he decided that today would be the day to change the light fixture. To remove the crappy 1930 one and replace it with the awesome florescents that we removed from the kitchen when we moved in.

So, at 7:30, my television shuts off and my laptop stops charging. He shut off the power to the front side of the house. Yes, I could have just moved the laptop to the dining room and continued on, but I choose to talk on the phone. For two hours.

Around 9:30, he asks me to come downstairs. "Oooh, yay!" I thought to myself. "He's done!"

He is standing in front of a piece of drywall. He tells me that he's ready to put it on the ceiling. I ask if he checked the fixture. He said he did and it worked. So, we put up two pieces of drywall where the new light will go, right over the pool table.

(Let me just backtrack and say that this was an extremely uncomfortable feat, as I got the job of holding the drywall...while kneeling...on a slate pool table.)

Then, a little more work (aka, my husband supervising while I kneel on a pool table with a long florescent fixture carefully balanced on my shoulder and use both hands to connect wires while he hands me pliers and electrical tape) and the fixture is up. Before screwing it up on the ceiling, I asked if we should check it. "No, it'll work," he says. So we screw the fixture into the ceiling.

I finally am able to sit down and he goes over to the fuse box. He switches the switch. Darkness.

"Oh," he says, "The switch upstairs is off." So he goes and flips it. Darkness.

So, we look at the fixture. A wire is loose. He pushes it back into place and tries again. Darkness.

We put the old fixture up, thinking maybe the bulbs blew with all the wiggling we were doing. Darkness.

We proceeded to flip switches, check electrical currents, change bulbs, etc. Darkness.

We take the drywall back off the ceiling and undo the new wires, leaving just the old ones. Then we reattach the florescent fixture to the original wires (the same ones that allowed it to work the first time). Darkness.

Maybe the wrong wires are paired up. The old ones are both black, not the cool color coding we have now. So, we exchange them. Darkness.

So, we attach the original fixture to the original wires. Darkness.

We gave up for the night. And what do we have to show for it? The original fixture with original wires and a huge mess.

Ugh. Men.

Ugh. Houses.