I hinted last week that one of the items on the to-do-list pushed itself to the top of the list. It started while I was at work on Friday afternoon and got a call from the DW. She thought she blew the fuse to the microwave and wanted to know where to find the new fuses and which one in the box would need to be replaced. The call ended with her agreeing to wait for me to get home in a couple hours to look things over and switch out the fuse. That should have been the end of it, but it wasn’t. A little while later, the DW called back. She hadn’t touched the fuse, but the power was now back to the microwave – but, it didn’t run at full power. Additionally, some of the other outlets weren’t working right and lights were dimmer in some of the rooms.

We knew moving in that the fuse box was a bit of a mess. It’s actually a series of fuse boxes – instead of replacing the original box as the need for electricity grew in the house, a series of sub-boxes were added over time. Like I said; a bit of a mess, and more than what I wanted to dig into on my own. So after hunting for a loose neutral wire with my brother (the electrician) for several hours, he finally pegged the problem to somewhere inside one of the old fuse boxes.

Instead of adding another Band-Aid to an already pieced together system, I threw the contents of the refrigerator into a couple of coolers, plugged the deep freezer into a portable generator,and shut the power off to the house. The next morning, I woke up early on a shopping mission for everything we’d need to replace the old fuse box with a new breaker box. And by “we” I mean “my brother” while I assisted. There aren’t many home improvement projects I can’t handle, but I’m smart enough to know when I’m in over my head. Completely replacing the box in a couple hours was better left to someone that does that kind of work on a daily basis.

So, by the end of the weekend the lights were back on and we had marked item number 5 off of our 2014 Home Improvement Goals List. By adding the new breaker panel, we were able to remove the old main fuse panel and three sub-panels. It’s not everyday where an unexpected failure is actually what you were planning on replacing anyway.