THE CAVENDER DIARY

I started this blog to not only document the progress of personalizing our house, but to record the ups and downs of home ownership.

That being said,  Wednesday morning I started the day by microwaving leftover bacon cheese fries (I know , the breakfast of champions) and the power in the front half of the house suddenly clicked off. Now this is a common event during the month of December when the some-odd-thousand exterior holiday lights put some strain on the rest of the electric flow in the house. So I skipped over to the breaker box in the garage ready to simply flip the breaker back to its normal “working’ position. But there was no tripped breaker, in fact, everything looked as normal as a 40 year old breaker box could…….it was when Jamie popped the cover off the electrical panel …. that we saw it  …..

See that second wire there?  The one that connects the outside power to our house……..that’s a load wire, and,well, it’s not supposed to be melted, bubbled, charred and overall pretty freaking scary looking…like it is. There is even a frightening  little pile of ash underneath. This is Not something a homeowner wants to ever see.

The whole box smelled like I imagine brimstone smells.

When we had the initial inspection of the house, we were told that we would  need to update the breaker box. The estimates we had were all in the $1200-$1500 range.  We knew it would be replaced, just when we were ready to do it. Not now, not today.  We pulled out our checkbooks ready to cough it over…….”Yes now, Yes today” we were both thinking.  After a visit from Joel with Big D Electric, he replaced the load wires and installed a new main breaker in just a couple hours…..the best part is that our home warranty covered the expense, we just paid $60 for the visit. Not nearly the huge expense we were both dreading.

Here’s another shot of the breaker box with the charred input at the top …..

We still need to replace the entire box, but it can wait a little while longer.  And now I can eat my leftover cheese fries hot.

I hope to post some pictures of the new paint on the outside , but every time I start painting, it rains.  So far, about 1/3 of the trim is chocolate. With all the traveling the 2 of us are doing in the next 2 weeks, it doesn’t look like we will be adding much more anytime soon.  This is still much cheaper than paying someone to paint for us …….but not really a speedy process.