The Scratching Post

What has kept me so busy that I couldn’t be online every day? Our house. Quite literally I’d spend the day working in the basement, fixing lights, laying tiles and scrubbing this or that in preparation for all the guests we had over.

Seriously, we were practically running a hotel at one point. We had my aunt and uncle from Texas with my cousin and his dog, a cousin (locally) who wanted to spend a few nights over here and another aunt and uncle from the Philippines. They were all here for my graduation celebration back on June 26th in which we packed the house in with more guests.

But that renovation work was handy. It opened up our basement, which was quite unusable for sometime. On a side note, we also power washed the house, sidewalk and deck, stained the deck and re-landscaped our yard all within the month of June. And we did all ourselves.

I nearly blew my hand off doing some of the electrical work. Never cut a live wire. Just no. Make sure you have someone around you who knows what they’re doing. (Thankfully my Uncle from Texas is an electrical engineer and helped finished the wiring project).

Here’s what happened: I was finishing some outlet work in our basement. For safety sake, you need the power out before working with wires of any kind. I tried turning off the circuit breaker for the line I was cutting, but since the line was relatively new, I didn’t know if the switch I picked choked the power or not. Turns out it didn’t. I went in to nip away a bit of line to strip it, but after I clamped, the charge blew me back and the air crackled like thunder. The pliers I used were thankfully rubber insulated, and I had rubber gloves on to boot, but the resulting charge that built up arced into the air like lightning searing the back of my glove and leaving a giant notch in the blade of the pliers. I wish I had a picture of the glove to show you where it hit, but let’s just say I’d have a terribly burnt hand right now or be very dead if the arc managed to hit me.



Thankfully none of my other renovation exploits were no where near as ravishing, but I did learn a lot from doing all those projects over the past month.

Whew.