i am a budding electrician

Picture this: we’re prepping our living room for paint, so I’m taking off outlet covers. I comment on how much I dislike the outlets in the kitchen, because they look so dirty. As I approach an outlet in the living room that’s a different color than the rest, I realize that it has been painted. Not just the cover, but the entire outlet. It sets in with a debby downer sound going off in my head that this is why the kitchen outlets look grimey. They were painted a dark gray metallic color at one point, and the paint has mostly worn off, leaving those outlets looking like so:


I didn’t like the color of the outlets in the first place (they were an off-white/beige and I thought bright white would be better), and the fact that they had a shoddy paint job led us to believe, with the help of a few unnamed family members, that we should just switch them out for new, white ones because it would be “really easy”.

HA!

It was not easy. Ladies and gentlemen, this wiry mess is what lurks behind your nice clean, simple-looking outlet covers, waiting for you to try to mess with it and screw things up. Every single outlet had something unique wrong with it. A wire wasn’t long enough to reattach to the new outlet. The screws were stripped so it wouldn’t come out of the wall. To fix it, larger screws had been put in to keep it in place, but those screws didn’t fit in the holes of the new outlets, and so on, and so on. I’m estimating we changed around 50 outlets throughout our house, and each one took at least 20 minutes. Maybe slightly less for some of the light switches. Either way, we spent a lot of time on these.

Worth it? At the time I’m sure I thought not. But you know I love me some bright white to freshen up our house and modernize it a little, so I’m good with it. I’m glad we did it. And hey, I got to learn how the wiring works. Neat.