Thursday, November 01, 2007

The Mystery Remains Unsolved, and I'm a Big Chicken

Ed is obsessed with the electricity which used to flow so sweetly to the overhead lights in our back room and is now mysteriously vanished. He is sure that the carpet men did something, but he can't figure out What. Today we poked our flashlight around through the small opening which leads into the area under the back room. The opening is about eighteen inches high, but the area through which one would have to crawl is filled with ducts, debris, protruding nails, and spiders. And that is only the stuff that I could see. There are probably snakes, scorpions, rats, and goblins as well. Ed wanted to go in but couldn't. I didn't want to go in and wouldn't.
Ed suspects that the carpet guys, either knowingly or unknowingly, cut some wires when they were reconfiguring the area between the kitchen and the backroom, which used to have a tiny "step" and now has a nice smooth slope (the back room, being a former porch, is slightly lower). There are electrical wires in the basement which used to run up to this exact spot, and they are now hanging. But, we can't remember whether they might have been hanging before the carpet guys ever showed up, and there is no power running to those wires. But they are in the right place to run directly up to the light switch which controls the back room lights. Weird, eh?

A man from the gas fireplace store showed up today to look at our gas logs and see if they could be activated. He found our logs very interesting. Apparently they, like so many things about our house (the wiring in particular) are antiques. Unlike some antiques, though, antique gas logs are not good to have. They lack desirable modern safety features. The guy was very nice, and told us that he could take our logs back to the store and possibly get them working, but he strongly suggested that we would be better off heaving them into the garbage. So now he's going to see if he can get the gas log salesman to visit us. So much for an easy fix!
(Our fireplace box thingy is a little bit rusty, but the repairman said our logs were Top of the Line back forty or fifty years ago. Of course, now the company that made them is out of business. But they are really good outdated logs.)

1 comment:

Wisteria said...

Electrical weirdness scares me more than anything. I am a huge chicken about sparking and shocking. I wouldn't be able to sleep until I found out why the lights don't work any more.