Charging ahead

A few weeks ago we had several electricians out to look at the circuit that's powering the laundry room plus three rooms on the second floor. At some point in the history of this home, somebody replaced all the wiring with armored cable but left a large chunk on one measly 15 amp circuit. It's easy to overload the circuit, especially if the washer is running or, in summer, if we have a window AC unit cooling the bedroom. Crank up the vacuum and *thunk* there goes the breaker.

Technically we're not up to code, either: The washer should really be on a dedicated circuit. Since we're trying to paint and fix up the room that will shortly become the nursery, I decided now is the time to have any holes punched or trim pulled. Actually, I was hoping to have the nursery done by now, but getting an electrician to first give you a cost estimate and then schedule time to do the work seems to consume more time than I realized.

I'd consider doing the job myself, but (A) I have no experience with electrical work and therefore I'm really squeamish mucking around with it, and (B) it's not a real easy job for someone with no experience running wires. Part of the problem is that there are no common walls between the first and second floor – everything is offset by a foot or more – so getting the lines up to each room will take some finagling. We looked at running them externally through PVC on the back of the house – the quick and dirty solution – but there's enough crap running up the outside of the house and I don't need an additional eyesore, especially one in grey PVC.

Anyway, we have somebody coming in two weeks to try and knock this job out. In the meantime I've been repairing a bedroom window I broke while removing a window AC unit. The piece of plywood currently in its place looks really classy, but I need to let the glazing sit for a week or so before painting and installing the sucker. I also made some repairs to the interior of the window frame that I replaced, ummm, early in spring. That was definitely one of those "I'll get to it next week" projects that took a few months to tackle. It's not the only one.