The Arbitrary ChuckJerry

DIY, for those who don't spend their time thinking about anagrams for everything, is Do It Yourself. In fact, on my cable system now ther eis a DIY channel that shows all about doing shit around your own house. Anyway, today I took a step towards building my own dream home one day.

Yesterday as I walked out of my bathroom I clicked the switch to turn off the light and it broke off in my hand. It was really ghetto style. So the light was off and there was no way for me to turn it back on. Actually, there was, since I managed to use a Q-tip to pull the metal piece forward and complete the circuit to turn the light on, though that's not really a feasible means of flipping the switch. I was just interested in how the thing worked. The whole mechanism was broken so the only way to fix it was to replace the switch.

I thought about call ing maintenance, but I remembered watching my father in law install a lamp in my house and I've seen on the This Old House type of deals where they install new switches and things. I unscrewed the fixture and looked at the wiring, and it didn't seem like too big a deal. Off to Home Depot where I bought a new double switch (one controls the light and the other controls the fan).

On a side note, the first Home Depot I went to didn't have the switch I needed in white, only in an almond color, so I had to go to another one. In some odd planning world there are two Home Depots in Queens, both on College Point Boulevard, literally 1.5 miles apart. So I rode down the street and picked up the switch.

I'm making a way bigger deal out of this than it actually was. To install a switch you simply 1) turn off the power, 2) unscrew the wires from the old fixture, 3) screw the wires into the new fixture in exactly the same way, and 4) turn back on the power. It's hardly rocket science, but it's something that I would have undoubtedly called maintenance or someone to do before it occurred to me today that it probably wasn't that hard to do. The only complication was that on a double switch you have to break off a metal piece in between the two switches so that the two power sources are independent. Otherwise both switches will control both devices. That's what I did the first time before reading the instructions and realizing I had to disconnect the two.

The whole electricity concept is enormously simple. If the circuit is connected, the ight goes on, and if it's not connected you get no light. All the switch does is click into place to hold back the metal piece from connecting the circuit until you flip it on. I guess I knew that intuitiively, but I didn't realize just how simple the idea is until I was futzing with the broken switch. I guess actually generating the electricity is more complicated, but once you do that lighting shit up is actually a relatively easy endeavor, save for the issues of scale.

I'm hardly Matt Dabney, who rebuilt his whole house from scratch or something to that effect, but I'm moving up in the world. In my old apartment before we moved in we did a ton of work on it including tearing out a built in bookshelf, removing all the old carpeting, replacing the countertop and sink in the kitchen, replacing a couple of the light fixtures, some plumbing repairs in the bathroom, installing new closet rods, filling in holes in the walls, painting everything, and probably more that I'm not remembering. Most of the complicated stuff was done by my father in law, though, and I either just watched or held stuff.

I guess that's my whole story. Hardly even interesting.