The Adventures of Pat Canole, Amateur Electrician

Much to my surprise, I've suddenly found myself quite handy around the house.

Under the close supervision and guidance of my father-in-law, we've greatly improved the electrical situation on the second floor this week.

We've run a new circuit upstairs. We've added two new outlets. We've fixed two switches that weren't working right. And we've replaced or upgraded a few more outlets.

I was a little hesitant at first. I had no prior experience with electrical work. But after taking things apart and realizing how bad the existing situation was, I felt like we could hardly make things worse. The whole upstairs was running off of one circuit. None of the outlets were grounded. The plugs were about 12 feet apart. The light switch also turned off the TV. Other wiring was just plain backwards.

It's definitely stuff that needed to be done. It'll be nice to clean up my chains of surge protectors.

And my computer outlet is actually grounded now. Hurray!