Electrician I Am Not

Earlier this week I came home to find that David changed his lightswitch and outlet in his "new bedroom". "Say what? You can do that and you didn't tell me?" So his honey do list grew a little bit. On Saturday we headed to Lowes to get some items and a few new switchplates to spruce things up (mind you, we prefer Home Depot for home improvement stuff, but I have to say Lowes has The Depot beat on home decor stuff). I took a nap thinking the things would be done when I woke up. Well, that's not exactly what happened. Something wasn't right and at the same time we were planning on having his 'rents over for game night. Needless to say game night turned into trying to get the light and switches on our stairs to work in addition to a new outlet in our bathroom to work. After hours of tooling, with the help of his dad, and me staying out of the way, the bathroom worked, but not the stair switches. We have older wiring that isn't marked as what is what and the switches were VERY old. So we headed to The Depot this morning and had some help from the guys. We purchased one of those cheaper electrical sets with all the testers and ohm meter, etc. and thought we'd be able to fix it. We took a detour on our way home to see my 'rents as it was Kara's birthday yesterday, so they were all coming over to open presents. We had fun doing that. Kara's such a sweetheart and it was good to see them all including Tara, Joe, and Allysen too. After that we headed home and David dug in again. I spent some time outside working on the yard to stay out of his hair. I came back in after about 1/2 hour and still nothing. He was using the detectors however, the sensor detected that all the wires were hot. Huh? Back to the Internet we go trying to find answers. At this point I jump in totally green and start fiddling with it. Somehow David and I came to the conclusion of installing the upstairs switchplate upside down and what do you know, but it worked! I'd like to thank the guy at The Depot or the Internet, but this was pure luck. And of course looking back Alpa even had that idea, but no, they had tried everything and just wanted to give up last night. I couldn't blame them considering they started at about 4pm and were still going at it until midnight. David said, "I'd like to say it was worth it, but I don't think it was." But I do. I love my quieter switches and beautiful switch plates. And now I can actually dry my hair without my dryer coming out of the outlet because it was previously installed upside down and had lost it's tight grip. One more thing that we can check off our list. However, I must say it was never really on our list to begin with. Hope everyone else had a productive weekend too!