The Adventures of Homeownership OR The Crazy Pregnant Lady (you choose which title you think fits)

Prepare yourself, this one's a doozie.

So I am definitely very glad to finally be in our home and unpacking, etc. but for those of you who still have the joys of renting, don't be fooled. Being a homeowner is definitely an adventure. And due to the fact that this home was bank-owned, we didn't have a whole lot of information about it when we moved in. We knew that there would be projects and some things that needed fixing up, but I still wasn't prepared for the adventures.

Take last week, for example. I was in the front room unpacking some boxes and I started to feel pretty warm. I realized that Nathan had closed the A/C vent over my head the night before to keep the bedroom a little cooler while we slept. I couldn't reach it to open it up and being my big fat pregnant self didn't want to haul a chair in and pull myself up on it to open it. But there is a little lever that hangs down from the vent that just needed to be pushed forward slightly to do the trick. Since I had just opened up a box of kitchen stuff, I decided I would use a frying pan to reach up and push the lever forward.

I had to turn off the ceiling fan and wait for it to stop spinning first because the vent is placed underneath it. It stopped so I reached up with the frying pan but as soon as I barely touched the vent with the pan I heard a loud POP! and sparks flew EVERYWHERE. And not just little sparks, massive ones that made me think my carpet was sure to start fire. I was so confused! All I did was barely touch the thing!

I immediately called Nate at work and told him about it, and he was just as surprised as I was and unsure of what could've caused the problem. So then I decided to call my mom and dad, my dad being somewhat of an electrician. As I was on the phone with my parents, the A/C kicked on and I happened to be standing underneath a vent in another room that was open. I wasn't sure, but I thought I could smell smoke coming from the A/C vent. I told my parents, "I think I smell smoke, I gotta go!"

I walked from room to room sniffing underneath the vents to see if I could smell any smoke when the phone rang. I answered it and it was my mom who (bless her heart) had the fire department on the other line. She lives out of town and was worried about me and convinced me that it was a good idea to have someone come and check my attic to make sure it wasn't on fire. I told the guy the whole little story and he said they would be there in a few minutes. I just kept thinking, "Please, PLEASE don't come blaring your sirens...then all my brand new neighbors will be over here gawking and asking what is wrong. How can I explain that I was opening an A/C vent with a frying pan without looking like a crazy woman?"

The fire department showed up a few minutes later, thankfully very quietly and came into the house. There were four men and you can imagine the looks on their faces as I tried to explain what had happened. I even showed them the frying pan because it had a few holes in it where the sparks had hit. They all just looked at me, gawked at me rather, and one of them said, "Ma'am, that's what happens when you bang metal together hard enough...it creates sparks."

Um....excuse me? I'm sorry, do I have IDIOT written across my forehead??? They seriously thought that I was BANGING the frying pan as hard as I could on the A/C vent, hard enough to create massive sparks that burn HOLES IN FRYING PANS!!! What!?! I tried to convince them that I had not been banging the frying pan on the vent, but simply touched the pan to the vent when it all had happened, but they obviously didn't believe me. That is until one of them checked my breaker box and found that two of the switched had been tripped. He came in the room and told the others that it was, in fact, an electrical problem and not a crazy pregnant lady problem. Ok, he didn't actually say that, but I could see it in his eyes.

Anyway, they checked the attic and everything was ok but they did tell me that I did the right thing in calling them because there is some sort of electrical problem and it should be fixed before I turned my electricity back on...that's right, they turned it off, in the middle of the day during 115 degree weather. Nathan (the sweetheart) came home early to be with me and melt with me to help get the problem taken care of.

After several HOURS of phone calls and dying of heat (I won't go into why it took so long because that would make this post even longer!)I finally spoke with an electrician on the phone. It was too late in the afternoon to get an electrician to come and look at it that day but he said he would send someone the next day. Thankfully he gave me the okey to turn my electricity back on in most of the house, but said I should leave those rooms turned off that had been tripped.

To make a long story short (ha ha...too late) the electrician came the next day and found that the genius who lived here before us wired the ceiling fans on his own. This is fine if you have a clue as to what you are doing but he obviously did not. This guy actually wired the ground and the hot together. Now I am no electrician, but even I know that the purpose of the ground is to keep people from getting electrocuted, and if you wire that together with something that has an electrical current going through it, you defeat the purpose altogether. Because of this, the A/C vent had become the ground for the fan. The electrician explained that when I used the frying pan I accidently bumped the fan and the vent at the same time, completing the circuit between them. He also told me that if someone had touched the two at the same time with their bare hands they would've been killed. KILLED PEOPLE! I can't believe this guy...he could've killed me or Nathan so easily, all because he was too cheap to hire someone to do something that he had no idea how to do correctly on his own.

Anyway, I am sorry this post is so incredibly long. If you actually read this entire thing you are a true friend. :D