Not Scared of Lights

OK, I have mentioned that the wiring in The Serpico House is old. The house was built in 1950, so this is no shock (no pun intended.)

This became a bigger concern when our dining room dimmer switch decided to break. Now, that switch was old, so it was bound to break eventually. So we were using floor lamps in the dining room for a while. Why? I'll be honest... I was scared to mess with it. I was kind of afraid I'd get shocked. But something happened. I became brave. That was probably because I was kind of tired of not being able to see in there without turning on a lamp. So I turned off the power to the house and took a shot.

Here's what it looked like:


I don't know if you can see this, but what we had was basically three wires coming out of the wall... two were wired to one wire on the switch, and one was wired to the other wire on the switch. New components have three or four wires--a hot wire (red), a neutral wire (black) and a ground wire (green). Sometimes you'll see a fourth wire. I don't know what to do with that one. Anyway, I called a friend who knows about wiring, and he told me that houses from that era don't have grounding. So this left the other two wires, which were both black. My friend told me that the spliced wires had to be the "hot" wires because the splice was carrying power on to the next switch or outlet. So that spliced set of wires should be wired to the red wire. This means the other black wire had to go to the black wire. And the ground wire? It goes nowhere, so I wrapped it up.

Here's the old switch:


It was old, OK?

I was scared to try the newly wired switch... but we tried it. And it worked. I was so proud. Here's how it looked when I got it all back in there.

So that solved our lighting concern in the dining room. Much better.

But do you remember that we had crap lighting in the kitchen, especially near the stove? Well, we do plan to replace the overhead light with something more significant. But, until we do... I have created this temporary solution:


Is it super-cool and awesome kitchen lighting? No. But it's functional, and we can see while we cook. I'll put it in the "win" category for now.