WAHOOOOOOO! AND THEN THERE WAS LIGHT!!!

Well here is my second blog in a row! It is too late to call anyone to celebrate so I will BLOGIT for ya'll! My wife won't take any pics right now cause she is ready to "go to bed" J/K about the quotes! BUT in DEC '08 this crazy thing happened, we lost all our power to this one breaker line - which included the entire upstairs, the bottom of the stairs the outside light and the kitchen and dining room! Luckily we finished our kitchen and put in some more lighting and did all the work on a different breaker! BUT LET ME TELL YOU WHAT - LIFE STUNK AROUND HERE CAUSE IT WAS ALWAYS DARK UPSTAIRS - WE HAD ORANGE AND WHITE EXTENTION CORDS RUNNING EVERYWHERE WITH DESK LAMPS ON THEM FOR LIGHTING! Just imagine for a second having no power to your only full bath and all your bedrooms!!!!! (Jenny thinks she needs to write about no power) THIS IS A BLAKE POST ONLY THOUGH!

Well no time to fix much during finals and Christmas vacation so we simply took out the ceiling fan in the kitchen cause it was still needing replaced and we thought this might be the first stop on the line! NO LUCK and a partially destroyed cieling. We went home for Christmas and had to come home to what we thought was NO POWER again and a major project! Much to our suprise we had power again! A MIRACLE! But little did we know it blew again in two weeks! If you know anything about power you are probably diagnosing right now, but I give ya it all and we'll see if you figured it out from the start!

1 - Here was my thinking (with a little help from Daddy Jones, Stan (broinlaw), Devon (ward friend), and ... Well maybe there is a loose wire! - so I opened all the outlets and switches ( how many =20+ ) NOPE - maybe a loose one in the upstairs bath but it didn't solve the problem!

2- Maybe the breaker is bad! - replaced the breaker!

3- Maybe the GFI - take it off

4- Well it must be early in the line cause everything goes, not just a segment, but everything - so I tell Jenny that I need to see where the wire that leaves the box goes and then trace it from there! NO - She was very protective of our walls, which is a very good thing cause I am a much better destroyer than I am a constructor and she does all the taping and tecturing! So each day I would convince her to let me extend the hole in the kitchen cieling one more truss over and then I would see how the wires ran toward the box! Well it is now 3 weeks from lights out and I reached to wall next to the breaker box and saw two wired going behind our upstairs bathroom sink - BUST OUT THAT WALL BABY AND SEE WHAT IS THERE AND WALA! A WHOLE BUNCH OF WIRES! (we still have to finish that bath so I didn't feel that bad!) But not much showing here!

5- Today I had enough, got some encouragement from family to keep looking, and FINALLY GOT THE BOSS' PERMISSION TO CUT A HOLE IN THE PAINTED WALL IN THE KITCHEN TO SEE THE WIRES LEAVING THE BREAKER BOX! And what a mess - but found the problema!!!! We have Knob and Tube (which we knew but don't fully understand) and any how they separate the white from the black using a funky box and it was causing a problem, so I removed the wires from it, and found the white wire was taped up like crazy, took off the tape to find the white wire was broken in half!!!!! - FINALLY A DIAGNOSIS!!!! "THE KEY TO A PROPER TREATMENT PLAN IS AN ACCURATE DIAGNOSIS" - NOT SO EASY WHEN YOU DON'T HAVE X-RAY OF YOUR HOUSES WIRING! Well we placed the wire NUTS and wahoooooeeeee! THE lights work and I have an alarm clock, can see in the closet, shower, shave..................................!!!

Well now I'm more calmed down - I must say it was quite a thrill to have it working --> Jenny was a good assistant, she helped a ton tracing the wires, and she was the one who has had to deal with the NO POWER more than me. What a trooper she has been, and it was a good thing she kept me under control! Now we have to sheet rock a 6'x1' area and a 8"x6" area instead of our whole house!!! The other thing is - what a miracle of the tithe. This has been a blessing of paying our tithing! - For the first year or so we were tight - paid a full tithe and you know what we didn't receive money from the windows of heaven but we didn't have any home catastrophe's that we had to pay for!!!! Now we are military, have an extra buck here and there, and I'm active duty this month so we have the means to fix problems like this! What a pain it has been but what a blessing for it to occur now rather than then!!!!