February 23, 2026
I can't remember if it came up in the home inspection, or if I discovered it shortly after moving in, but the outlets in the master bathroom have been bad since I moved in. No big deal, really; I need the clippers every few months to cut my hair and that's it for my bathroom electricity needs. And there's an outlet in the bedroom right next to the doorway so I just did that for several years.
After a decade or so, I got sick of that. I went to Home Depot and bought myself a new GFCI outlet. And... it didn't work. I double-checked the instructions, made sure there was a load on the outlet, and still: nothing.
Maybe I got line and load reversed? I made sure I was using the conductors from each piece of romex and not crossing them, and swapped line and load. Nope.
Well, at that point I was out of ideas. More importantly, I was also out of fucks. So I just left it as it was for a few more years.
And then I got sick of staring at it again, and I was long-overdue to get the "annual" electrical checkup that I was paying for. Guy comes in, I explain the problem, and he pops the faceplate off the breaker box.
It's kinda bad, y'all. At some point the bathroom outlet breaker failed in rather spectacular fashion, and did some damage to the bus bar it was on. A breaker on the other side apparently needed to be moved, which explains the blanking plate across from the bad breaker. The real solution to this is to replace the breaker box, which as of recent local code changes requires a total of about $14,000 worth of electrical fuckery. On top of the windows and trim that I'm paying for for the next *mumble*.
So, that's getting put off for a bit. The electrical system in the house is fine as far as I can tell; the place has failed to burn down in the 16 years I've been here, which means I'm not too worried about it. Once we're back on daylight time I'm going to go buy myself a new 20-amp breaker and see if that's my only problem; there's a non-zero chance I'll need to move that breaker like the previous owners moved the one that had been across from it. But at least that way I'll have a functional bathroom outlet instead of running the clippers in from the bedroom. And it's something I can afford, which is always a plus.
Fuckin' A, man. By the time I fix all the shit that should have been caught the first time I'll have gone a long way toward buying this place a second time. And that's before we get to all the stuff I've been wanting to do but keeps getting put off for the stuff I have to do.
