Chaos

Years ago, I read an issue of Fine Homebuilding -- I still have it, tucked away like the teddy bear that a grown woman saves from her childhood -- wherein someone wrote about the building of Skywalker Ranch. Several points delighted me, none more than their observation that the construction plans included not only channels for existing power and communications lines, but channels left empty for technologies as yet uninvented. I liked the orderliness of that image. The planning, the foresight -- that made a lot of sense to me. Of course that's how houses, any houses, are wired. Of course.

As it turns out, our house does not demonstrate that foresight and planning integrity.

We've known for a while of one flaw in our kitchen. When it was rebuilt, we had sockets installed in the walls above the counters. One of the sockets, we discovered long after they were gone, was loose in the wall. You could actually pull it out, cable and all. We assumed that they'd just missed the stud. Since the wall was sealed, we couldn't fix it easily, so we juryrigged a piece of wood to sort-of hold it in place. It would still come out, but not far. Yesterday, when they took the wallboard off in the bathroom next door, it exposed the other side of that box. We looked at it.

The box is halfway between two studs. Not only did it not 'just miss' a stud, it missed it by about as much as you can and still be in the wall. The electrician who installed this obviously knew about it -- and he just walked away. Not a word was said to us.

Last night, we tried to fix it. Neither of us is a carpenter or an electrician, or particularly handy with tools. We tried. No good. But at least we knew enough to pop the breaker before we did anything around the socket. We plugged something in, and started flipping breakers. When the plugged-in thing stopped making noise, we noted which breaker it had been. I thought better check once more, and found to my surprise that the socket we'd checked was not on the same breaker as the socket next to it, on the same wall. So we found that breaker, and flipped it. As I say, our attempt to repair it was futile, and today we're going to ask the workers if they can fix it.

We also discovered that the phone, which is plugged into a completely different socket on a completely different wall, was dead.

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Update: We have an electrician here today. He looked at it. Turns out this kind of box doesn't get nailed to a stud -- there's supposed to be a bracket nailed in place, and the box gets slotted -- somehow -- into the bracket. They never put in the bracket. And after he looked at it, he said the magic words:

Yeah, I can fix that.