University Adventures

A little over a month ago, the fan in my dining room broke. And by broke, I mean the light chain came out of its place and stayed in my hand, as I was turning the light off. My housemate and I have lived without a light in our dining room for over a month now and are starting to adjust to the life of a photophobic. 

Broken/Lightless fixture

So, my housemate and I have spent the last couple of weeks picking out new fixtures. Because, lets face it, when you have the opportunity to redecorate, why not do it right? We currently have new fixtures going into the kitchen, dining room, hall and switching the living room fan with a bedroom fan. Tuesday night, as we were waiting for an electrician to show up and preform this work of magic, we began discussing doing the job ourselves. Sure, neither of us know the first thing about electric workings, but replacing a fan couldn't be that hard, right?

After laughing at the picture of us replacing the fixtures ourselves, my housemate said "we'd probably get shocked if we tried". To which I replied, "except, we are smart enough to flip the breaker before attempting such a task, right?"

It was at this point we both realized that neither of us had a clue where the breakers in our house were located. We shot up out of our chairs and raced away. She to the garage, me to the hallway. I remembered a box in the hall closet that I wanted to inspect......

Suspicious Box

The conversation went something like: "Hey! I found a box....um....its locked...do we know where the key might be?" At this point, we were both laughing. I think the picture running through both are minds was flipping a breaker, being left in complete darkness and then discovering that we had to find a key to get to our breaker system. Thankfully, the mad search did not last long, and I discovered the key and opened the box. What I found inside scared me, it looked like something out of Chuck.......

Do I cut the red wire?!

End of the story is anti-climactic; we realized this was the alarm system and later discovered the breaker box in the master closet. (Yes, we think that is an odd location as well, but we didn't chose it) I think our next great adventure will be figuring out which switch goes to which part of the house and labeling them correctly.

Found it!

So ends this episode of University Adventures. Oh, and for the over-curious, our electrician never showed up that night, but I hear he'll come on Saturday and fix all our wonderful lighting issues. Yay!