It is a truth universally acknowledged that there are two types of DIY household jobs. There are the fully designed, planned, costed, and workpackage-estimated and adjusted plans such as the Logstore Of Awesome.
Or there are the DIY household jobs that sneak up on you when you’re least expecting them. And that’s how it was on Saturday evening. I’d just got out of the shower, all clean and sparkling and sweet-smelling. I’d brushed my teeth, and was walking out of the bathroom as I tugged on the light switch cord and the movement of the cord wasn’t as it usually was and the light stayed on. I gave the cord a few more experimental tugs, tried changing angles and tugged again (look, this is as it happened, I can’t help it if you’ve got a smutty mind). The light stayed on, the switch defied me with its unswitchiness. Bugger. an unplanned DIY household job had made itself known at a most inconvenient time. Despite the lateness I got the stepladder out of the garage, climbed up to the ceiling, and unscrewed the switch cap. Unfortunately the rotatory-switchy bit was a sealed unit and offered me no opportunity to fiddle with it. Too late to do anything else that evening we went to bed.
Bright and early the next morning (10.15, because I had dogs to walk and feed and shit and that and anyway they don’t open until 10.00) I arrived at the big orange Mecca of all unplanned Sunday DIY household jobs (because the very helpful and incredibly useful hardware shop in Keyworth is shut on Sundays). For less than a Lady I bought a new one-way ceiling-mounted switch. While I was there I also bought a 5l petrol container (not a random purchase, I do have a planned use for it, unrelated to any electrical tasks). I unpacked all the gubbins, isolated the upstairs lighting circuit, got up the stepladder, disconnected the wiring, and removed the old switch from the ceiling. Only one of the two fixing screws had any significant purchase, so I gave the joist the switch was screwed to a poke with a screwdriver. It moved. Not the screwdriver, the joist. I was taken aback!
So I got the magic folding ladder down from the loft, climbed up and had a look. The old ceiling switch hadn’t been secured to a joist, it had been partially screwed into a loose, flat, piece of wood, about 18cm square. Just another indicator at the state of some of the jobs we’ve uncovered in this house. There was no joist in the near vicinity of where the switch needed to be located, so as a very temporary measure I wedged a much longer and larger piece of wood between two proper joists, making sure the new wood covered the hole it needed to. Then I fixed the new ceiling switch to the new piece of wood from inside the bathroom, and connected the new ceiling switch up to the electricity supply. Then I got back into the loft and put two L-shaped brackets on the new wedged piece of wood to hold it very securely in place.
With the folding ladder put away, the cover fitted to the new light switch, and all tools and the step ladder back in the garage, I swept up, of course.
Total time on the job: 35 minutes (not counting the trip to the DIY place). Not a bad morning’s effort.
Sounds like a job well done, fully deserving to be rewarded with tea and toast.
Got to be honest, Young Masher, I was proper chuffed. It’s not that often I tackle a simple little job for it to actually turn out to be a simple little job 🙂