Category: House stuff

We had an interesting failure in one of the closet light fixtures. We flipped the light switch, heard a loud pop, and the bedroom went dark and the emergency flashlight came on because the breaker tripped. When we looked at the light (because who looks at the light fixture every time they turn the light on?), it was just dangling from the ceiling.

When I got up there to investigate, it seemed pretty clear why the light was dangling. When I got the light fixture down, these two blue pieces fell down.

These had broken off the plastic electrical box for the lighting fixture wiring. It’s where the bracket for the light fixture screws in to. You can see where the pieces broke off in the areas circled in red.

The electrical box looks cracked and broken in a few other places along the top and sides as well. It’s looking pretty bad.

I also found a tiny piece of melted metal and a little bit of exposed wire poking out of one of the wire nuts. So it looks like what happened was when the plastic broke, the light fixture fell, and the small strands of wire poking out of the wire nut and the ground wire were touching the bracket that held everything up. When we flipped the switch, there was loud pop from the short circuit, and the breaker tripped. Fortunately nothing smoked or caught fire.

After seeing the condition of this box, now I kind of want to look at all the other electrical fixture boxes in the house to see how they look.

The rose bushes had an easier time this past winter than they did last year.

First roses of the season opened up this week, and there are a lot of them.

The indoor workbench (work table really) was in need of some vertical storage.  The table was starting to get cluttered with projects and parts and not many places to put them.  I also thought it would be nice to have some of the things I was always going into the closet for within easy reach.

I considered adding some shelves like I did for the closet but with the table being so deep (3′), I thought that would make reaching the shelves awkward.  Connie suggested getting some cheap bookshelves to make a hutch type thing.  Seemed like a pretty good idea (she often has good ideas like this), so I ended up buying some cheap inexpensive shelving units from Walmart: a 3-level cube shelf, and a three-shelf half-height book case.

Used some scraps of 1/4″ plywood as a back for the cube shelf (it only came with one cardboard square).  Secured the shelves to the table using screws that I put in from underneath.

Now I’ve got most of the things I reach for most within easy reach, and a little more space freed up in the closet.

Not quite sure what I’m going to do with the scanner yet.  I’ve got it sitting on the top of the shelves now.  It’s not something I use too frequently, so maybe I’ll just bring it down and plug it in as I need it.

When the power went out during Hurricane Irma last year, one of the issues we had was reaching the outlets that the freezer and refrigerator were plugged into so that we could plug them into the generator.  The outlets are in the wall behind the middle of each appliance, so we have to pull them out to reach the plug.  Not so easy when you’ve stuffed the freezer and refrigerator full to help them stay cold/frozen.

With Hurricane Florence on the way, we wanted to make the freezer and refrigerator plugs a little easier to reach in case we need to run them on the generator.  The shortest extension cords I have handy are either 25′-50′ long, or not a heavy enough gauge to handle the freezer and refrigerator current requirements.

A trip to Lowe’s got me a couple of 2-foot long 12-gauge extension cords (similar to this one but without the circuit breaker) and storage hooks.

Find a wall stud that’s within reach of the extension cord, drill a pilot hole, and screw in the storage hook.  Plug in the extension cord, plug the refrigerator into the extension cord, and you’re in business.  I zip tied the extension cord to the hook so that everything would stay in place.

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It’s a bit ugly, and we’re definitely not going to win any style contests, but it works.  Now when we need to plug the freezer and/or refrigerator into the generator, we can just reach over and grab the plug without having to move anything.

Once we get around to having a transfer switch for the generator installed, all of this will become a bit redundant, but that’s ok.  I’ll just patch up the holes and put the extension cords and hooks to use somewhere else.

With the space over the garage insulated, that just left the opening in the ceiling that gets you into the attic space uninsulated.

I happened to have a section of peg board about the right size, so I attached some drawer pulls I found at the local Habitat for Humanity store ($0.50 each) and glued a couple of the extra insulation batts to the board.

It lays nicely on top of the attic entry opening.

Moving it out of the way is a little bit cumbersome, but easy to do. Lift it up, turn 90 degrees and set it down on the rafters behind you.

Not sure how long it will last with repeated handling. At some point I might decide to replace the batts with some pieces of foam insulation. I think this will work well for now though.