Saturday, July 25, 2009

FROM SNAKES TO SNAKING WIRE


I'm up from the basement again. I just helped Dave snake about 40 feet of stove wire from one part of the basement (near the cistern) to the electrical box. Why stove wire, you say?

About two weeks ago our existing stove shocked (electrocuted?) me - up both arms. Scared the daylights out of me. A few weeks before that it had also zapped me but not as bad. Dave was feeling sorry because he knew there was probably a short in the stove. About the stove - it was 1970s-era, avocado green. A Tappan. It had had a good life. We were hoping to be able to use it until we redid our kitchen in Phase 2 of the Hardy House saga. Well, we had to do something.

We THINK we want to do wall ovens and a stove top when we redo the kitchen. The last thing we wanted to do right now was put money into something we didn't feel we would be using in the future. What to do? We went to Lowe's (they seem to be getting a lot of our money these days). We purchased the most inexpensive stove/range we could find. It is a Whirlpool and cost about $350.00 as it was 10% off from $398. We took it home with us where it sat in the barn until last week when we moved it in the kitchen. Dave spent all last Saturday working on getting the stove hooked up when I know he would have rather been working on the house. Of course, I told him if he wanted to ever eat again, I was going to have to have a stove. (I have now been without a stove for about 4 to 5 weeks our of 7.)

NOTE: Whenever you do a major remodel, it helps to have an outdoor grill and frozen meals made up in the freezer that you can microwave. Or, you can just go out to dinner a lot.

Anyway, Dave hooked up the stove and guess what? The new stove was live. Hmmmm. You know what that means, right? The wall wire was bad. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm quite happy we became aware of that so we could fix it before we had a fire. See the picture? Not pretty. The aluminum was just breaking off. Dave thinks that as he was working on the house and moving the wire he was braking it on the inside.

So the stove circuit went off again. Dave went to Lowe's who was out of stove wire and was told, "Sir, we can have it for you in about two weeks." No - Dave wants to eat. He also checked The Home Depot. He felt they were too expensive. The cost of the wire was between $1.50 and 1.90 a foot at these two stores. This morning we went to Colacino Electric (another fine Wayne County store) in Newark and we were able to purchase the wire for under $1.00 a foot. We were happy about that.

So maybe today I will again have a stove.

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