Electricity, Planning, and Minor Random Notes re: Emergency Dental Care

 November is nearly done and it has forced us to concentrate our efforts here at Surbiton Manor indoors. Yet, efforts continue, facing at last the fiasco that the Hated Previous Owners (HPO) left inside, planning for next year and battening the hatches. 

Electricity

The HPO left gigantic, oversized ceiling fans in every room of the house. The three bedrooms all have them. Each was controlled through a bizarre remote control system of some kind. And all of them are broken. 

The obvious solution: replace them with a simple, flush-mount light fixture. How hard can it be? A late '70's house should be up to code and sport fixtures with all of the right wires. Let's do it. A cheap home improvement scheme. 

Now I have never been what one might call "handy." Basically, if you want a DIY project to have a certain air of being not quite all the way correctly done, something that will cost 2x as much and take 3x as much time as you might think it would, I'm your man. 

Paranoid, we shut off the main breaker (rather than fussing around with the individual ones). The we shut off all of the individual ones. And we made sure the wall-switch was in the "off" position. You can't be too careful, and, as the band Cypress Hill once memorably said, "I Ain't Goin' Out Like That." 

Disassembly was difficult. Kiki and I had our arms over our heads, burning, while I struggled to jam the screw driver into the hole and turn the thing about 1,000 times to get the fan released. Bits and bobs, screws, plastic dealios, rained down. The cat tried to eat the desiccant in the fixture box. Nevertheless, we persisted. 

The new fixture required us to blindly locate, through about 2" of yellow insulation (which tastes horrible, ask me how I know) two screws which would go into a keyhole. The trick is, you have to find them at the same time, blindly. Kiki held her phone up, I fumbled furiously with it, neck and arms burning. 

Harsh words were said. the HPO were indicted furiously. 

In the end, we got one done. Whew. The only flaw - it sits just a little bit below the ceiling. But if you don't look too hard, you can't see that. 

On to the next room.

This one proved even more difficult, as each screw holding it to the ceiling seemed to be placed in an even more awkward position and required the screwdriver to be manipulated into an almost impossible angle, and then turned about 2,000 times to release. 

Exhausted, we looked at the next fixture. 

The trick here, however, we learned after a fair amount of trial and error (mostly error), was that the screw holes in the junction box were the wrong size to fit the screws included with the fixture. What? They fit in the other room. Why not here? Disconcertingly, the wires were black, white, and green this time rather than black white and red, as in the diagram and instructions.

Having figured out the screw situation, we began to cast about for the old screws from the fan. They could work. Yeah! Now we had it. 

Until, that is, an ill-placed screwdriver fell the six feet from the top of the ladder where it had been carelessly laid, directly into the glass of the new light fixture, shattering it. Shocking amount of dramatic damage a screwdriver can do to a frosted glass ceiling fixture.

We capped off the electricity and called it a day, as, at 4:00, the light was beginning to fail anyway. 

Good times.

More Planning

With the flower bulbs and garlic planted, the garden now waits for spring. But this does not mean that we can be idle. We're going to have a lot more capacity next year. The beds from last year should be more productive as well, because we won't be planting corn. 

Things going through our minds:

• Growing things vertically - vining things like squash
• Setting up a rigorous plan for succession planting
• Finding a florescent lighting system to start seedlings (not long from now - February for some of them), and seeking T5 fixtures (sounds like T5 is what you want) at a bargain price. Maybe Black Friday deals? No such luck.)
• Drawing up plans for the garden plots. This year, we may try duplicate crops on different sides of the garden so that hopefully, if one set of, say, beets, were to be gnawed on by the local rodentia, the other set might be salvageable. (Ask us how we know they like beets...)

An Emergency Addenda: 

I read an article on a homesteading site suggesting that one have an emergency dental kit. Apparently, we are not the only ones to wholly neglect this. When you think about it, well, I for one thought to myself, "Duh!"

It turns out that there are a variety of products out there that can tide you over until you can see a real dentist (or, in the case of a total societal collapse, could be made to work in a pinch.) You can get:

• A dental mirror so you can see what you are doing
• A temporary cap kit, with which you can temporarily cement or replace a crown that falls off
• A "save a tooth" box with solution with which you could preserve a knocked-out tooth and have a better chance of having it re-implanted while it is still alive
• A cracked tooth filling kit
• A temporary filling kit (to replace one that falls out, should that happen)
• A kit to temporarily place a fake tooth replacing one that's knocked out

Now that we've got this stuff ordered (for ~ $60), it amazes me that we've gone without it this long. The slipping on a rock at a portage in the wilderness scenario is one that makes me think this would be a good idea. Smack! You come down on a rock with your face and knock your front teeth loose or out. What do you do? Crown comes off and the dentist can't see you for a week. Do you wander around with a sensitive stump in your mouth? Or do you temporarily fix it yourself? I know what I'd rather do.