It wasn't long after my wife and I moved into our house that we realized that it had something of a checkered past. We had had the house inspected before we bought it and had been assured that it was in good structural shape. "Good bones" was the way the inspector had put it. The longer we spent in the place, though, the more interesting, then strange, then truly bizarre things we discovered about it.
For instance - the front staircase, while structurally sound, was trimmed with framing lumber. The newel posts were actually garden gate posts and the hand rails were made from two-by-fours. The sliding glass door in our kitchen had obviously been added as an afterthought; the casing completely blocking two of our kitchen drawers. (We store takeout menus in them because we only have an inch and a half of clearance and can only slip two or three fingers in them at a time.)
My personal theory is that the original owners of the house back in the '80s had the basic house built by professional contractors but did all the finish work themselves.
"How hard could it be?" I can hear them asking. "All it takes to decorate a house is taste and we've got a crap-load of that!"
I like to compare our house to Olivia Newton John in the movie Grease - basically beautiful and wholesome but tarted up to appeal to John Travolta (not that I actually believe that Travolta ever lived here).
[I would just like to state for the record that I have never actually seen Grease, but my wife is a girl, and has thus seen it three or four thousand times. She tells me that this not a bad metaphor for our house.]
Foremost among the many questionable decorating decisions made by our house's original owners, however are the ceiling fans. These people indulged an enthusiasm for ceiling fans that was within hailing distance of some sort of fetish. There was no ceiling fan in the kitchen when we moved in, nor in the bathrooms, but that's about all you can say. Every other conceivable surface in our house that could possibly have a ceiling fan had one. Each bedroom had one. Our living room had two. I suppose that it goes without saying that they were all really ugly.
My wife and I quickly discovered a previously undocumented law of decorating - the nicer the ceiling fan you replace an ugly one with, the greater the likelihood that the instruction manual will be written in Sanskrit. We persevered however, and eventually replaced about half of the ceiling fans in our house. The rest were switched out for standard light fixtures. Unfortunately, this is where I first started to realized that electrons don’t like me.
When you take down a ceiling fan, electrical wires are left exposed. When you take a light fixture out of its box, an equal number of wires are exposed. It seems simple enough - connect one set of wires to the other, turn the power back on and get on with your life. Somehow, I managed to bungle this. We now have two separate rooms in our house where the light switches do nothing, but turning the fan switch will provide four distinct intensities of illumination.
So, it was with a sinking feeling in her stomach that my wife saw me go upstairs last weekend with my best friend to replace the last of the ugly ceiling fans. Between us, my buddy and I have about twelve years of college education and like to think of ourselves as "handy". In other words, we are exactly the last people you want to have messing around with live electricity.
Almost inevitably, we made such a mess of things that we had to abandon the whole project, leaving behind naked wires jutting out of the ceiling. My wife sighed and asked if that was dangerous, but we reassured her that we had solved the safety problem by locking the door.
Despite our reassurances, over the past week, I've been worrying more and more about the naked wires hanging from our ceiling. I've been staying awake at night, imagining a steady stream of electrons dripping off the exposed wires behind the locked door and collecting in a pile on the floor.
Now, I'm not a physicist (which kind of goes without saying), but as I understand it, subatomic particles are so dense that even a teaspoonful of electrons weigh about as much as Australia.
Check out my thinking on this:
A pile of electron dust weighing several billion metric tons would not so much collect on my guest room floor as it would punch its way through the planet's crust, dragging my house and the surrounding property with it to the Earth's core. (In such a situation, my only consolation would be that as we fell screaming to our fiery deaths, we would be taking the damn ceiling fan with us.)
This would leave a tunnel straight to the magma reservoirs that our tectonic plate floats on.
Would the magma spew to the surface, creating a giant volcano that would make Southern New Hampshire a tropical tourist attraction? Possibly.
Would the Pentagon look at the satellite images of the havoc and destruction caused by a brand-new volcano and order a retaliatory nuclear strike against Paraguay? Conceivably.
Would the magma hole plug itself before things actually got that far, just leaving giant pit that would eventually create a vast bottomless lake which the people of New Hampshire would use mainly for dumping wrecked cars in? Maybe.
All I know is that it will be your problem, because I will have gone to my doom, one hand clutched around the throat of my ceiling fan, the other hacking at it with a Philips head screwdriver and shouting, "From Hell's heart, I stab at Thee!"
Or I could just call an electrician. I'll have to sleep on it.
