The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

A month or so ago I tried to burn down my old house, accidental arson, but to no avail, just scorched some walls and fried the panel box and its antique breaker switches. So now I’ve torn off the interior walls, dismantled the old breaker box and installed a modern one, then reconnected wires and jettisoned even more I don’t need. Just for fun I replaced the old barnwood walls I tore off with a crowbar and replaced them with new cedar and tongue and groove maple flooring.

Now I have to call in a state inspector to certify it was all done according to code. Needless to say, I’m nervous. Not so much about the panel box replacement as the half mile of wires running throughout the shack, up the walls, exposed, illegal, definitely not code. I’m hoping I’m only being inspected on the box, not the entire house. Because of those fears a year ago I decided not to replace the panel. If I had been shut down, we’d lose the power to run the well. It’s one thing to live without electricity in the shop, quite another without water up at the house. This time we ran wire down from the main house to run the well house … so if we’re red-tagged by the inspector we can flush toilets and still make coffee. Small blessings!

I’ve been thinking how much of a miracle it must’ve been when that old shack got its first electricity. Water could be pumped from the 1930’s piston-driven Mayers pump one hundred feet deep directly into the house. There’s an addition on concrete, the only part of the house not on post and beam, that was the indoor bathroom. No more outhouse! They could power a refrigerator like the coil top GE electric one I still have in the freezer room. They could read at night by incandescent bulbs, run a sewing machine, listen to a radio! It must have seemed like a miracle all these things we moderns take for granted, a defining moment, a cause for celebration. I think maybe I’ll know exactly how they felt. If I pass that inspection….

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 24th, 2019 at 2:32 pm and is filed under rantings and ravings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.