The summer before Addie was born, I decided to spray paint our bathroom light fixtures. They were gold, and I'm not a big fan of gold. So, I took the light down, labelled all the wires so I could put it back together, sprayed the fixtures, and then hooked them back up.
Even though Jason could have done it, I wanted to do it myself because I was the in midst of third trimester nesting and redoing the bathroom seemed like a good idea at the time. (Not only did I spray paint the light fixtures, I painted all the other hardware and the vanity. Do not get in the way of a nesting pregnant woman.)
My brief foray into hooking up light fixtures gave me a small boost in the whole electrical hardware area.
Last spring, as part of my spring cleaning program, I decided that I didn't like any of the lights in the office or playroom. They were all wall mounted light fixtures, and they were all push-button lights. I didn't care much for any of the options at the lighting store, so I called an electrician to see if they could rewire the lights so that I could put in shiny new mason jar-styled lights.
The electrician told me that because of the age of the mobile home, and because the wiring hadn't been done to code in the first place, it would be an expensive job to redo all the wiring.
"If you were my daughter," Mr. Electrician told me, "I'd tell you to just redo the lighting yourself using wireless light switches. If I do it, it'll cost you more than $1000. If you do it, it will cost you much much less than that."
And so, I was on a mission to learn how to install wireless light switches.
I took all the light fixtures down, bought new ones, and then bought the switches.
As you can see, the converters are designed to be plugged into the wall, then have a lamp or something plugged into it, and then the wireless switch is mounted wherever you'd like. Turn it on. Turn it off. No fiddling around with hard to reach lamp knobs.
It's actually a pretty nifty contraption.
The only thing is light fixtures don't plug in. They're just a bunch of wires.
So, I took the plug-in piece apart and figured out how to rewire the light fixtures into the newly smaller-sized piece and put everything back together again. I did research online so I knew how to handle black wires and white wires and grounding wires. I discovered that the wireless switches had different channels, so I was able to put one room's lights on one channel and the other room's lights on a separate channel (because I didn't want to hit one wireless switch and have the lights turn on for both the office and the playroom).
I got to be pretty handy with electrical tape and wire cutters and mounting hardware. I knew how to turn the power off to all the spots where I was redoing lights.
To be sure, I made some mistakes. One time I shocked myself because I forgot to turn off the power. Another time I crossed wires and flipped the breaker. Another time I crossed wires and BLEW the breaker. That particularly mistake I didn't fix myself. My handy husband and father-in-law had to reinstall a new breaker at the panel box.
But, in the end, I installed six new lights that all work with wireless switches.
Doing all that work helped me realize that jobs that may typically be seen as "men's" jobs, don't have to be. I can turn power off. I can rewire lights. Tonight I spent the evening installing two pendant lights in our dining room. It involved cutting wires and hooking them into the converter box because the lights were being installed on a track-lighting system.
I've been wanting pendant lights in our dining room since we moved it, and now finally we have them.
Obviously, I don't even pretend to call myself an electrician. Installing light fixtures is electricity at its most basic, and a lot of people know how to do it. But through the process of the few lighting projects I've put myself in charge of, I realized that I can be handy too.
And I have to admit: it's kind of empowering knowing that if I wanted to replace or install a light fixture or switch, I can do it.
Now if only I could figure out how to install a garbage disposal...
