Electricity

Here's something I haven't said much about, probably because it is a slightly painful subject to revisit: electricity. 

No, that wasn't a pun, I didn't get shocked!

If someone asked you to tell them where you want lights, switches, outlets... you would know, right?  And I thought I was sure where I wanted things like that. But get an actual electrician on board, and suddenly you get asked those questions with some expertise behind them. 

All summer the electrician would ask me to make decisions. I don't know why most of those decisions fell into my lap, but they did. Usually my brain would have worked fine but I was suffering with the smoke, shortness of breath, anemia, pregnancy brain, and I could sit there with the electrician an hour and still not be able to make up my mind about a light bulb. 

Do you know the new all-in-one cheap LED light fixtures (that are in most new houses) don't have bulbs to change? Yup, you just take the entire fixture out and throw it away when its over. Granted, they last for years and years. But it bothered me that the whole thing was a throw-away item, which delayed decisions while I thought about alternatives.

I knew for efficiency we wanted LEDs. Did you know there is a huge selection of LED lights? In all tints of color? Do you want a cool white, a warm white, or sodium yellow? Do you want this in a strip, a round bulb, a flat light, an aimed light...

Do you want a double way switch here or a triple way switch? Dimmers? You will need a GFCI here and there because of code... and no you can't have that there or this here because you want that on a different circuit (I do?). 

I did know that I wanted outlets on either side of the place where the piano would go, rather than one behind!

Thankfully the electrician thought of things like an extra-heavy-duty outlet for my iron (now the lights won't dim when I turn the iron on!) and my sewing machine, too. 

At this point, all the indecision was over the roughed-in electricity; the angst over light fixtures would come later. 

And now that the electricity is "done" (hint: it seems to never be quite always done) I can see places where I REALLY need an outlet, or wish I had a light in the ceiling. There are lights in places I don't want them after all, and outlets that have been moved so many times they can't scoot over any more. The banks of light switches I thought I wanted (all in one convenient spot, right?) just have me standing there switching on the wrong lights (I really need to label...). If the electrician happens to be reading this, he'll get a big I-told-you-so laugh out of that one.