Best Friends

I have some of the BEST FRIENDS in the whole world. Folks that you can call up in the middle of the night and they will be there. People who help you move on long weekends. Friends who come stay with you after you have surgery and empty your drains. That kind of best friends.

Today I was blessed with help from 2 of these best friends once again. Hilary and Liam are away in BC on vacation, so I decided this would be the perfect time to move some furniture around. Specifically move Liam's bed downstairs to the spare room and move the bunk bed from the spare room to his room. Seems simple enough.

I knew that I could not move the beds by myself, so I called up my friends Sandy and Jason. Sandy just announced that she is 12 weeks pregnant (YEAH!) and wasn't feeling up for furniture moving, but Jason volunteered. Within an hour and a half of his arriving both beds were in their new locations, safely and securely put back together. (I made Jason climb up on the bunk bed and bounce about to ensure it wouldn't collapse.)

In order for the bunk bed to fit in Liam's room I had to take down his ceiling fan and put back the original light.

Ceiling fans + Bunk Beds = decapitated child *

I put up the ceiling fan, so I didn't think I would have any problems getting it down. The light itself is a simple 2 wire job - one black, one white. Basic electrical stuff says connect the blacks to blacks and the whites to white and Presto Mundo you have light!

Which I did and I did have light. Small problem though, I couldn't turn the light off. It was somehow not connecting to the light switch. Hmmmmmm.

I tried various combos like white-black and black-white but had the same problem because the box in the ceiling had an extra black wire and a white wire that someone had added black tape to. And since I'm alone, it was starting to be a lot of work to climb up the step stool, rewire everything, go downstairs, flip the breaker on, go back up, curse the damn light, go back downstairs, flip the breaker off and repeat.

So I called my great friend Brandon. Brandon is a carpenter so I figured he had to have some experience with this stuff. He is my go to guy for all things broken in my house. heck, he even came over and built our deck for us 2 years ago.

We talked it through, he drew a diagram of what I was seeing and said "Okay try this". And guess what? It worked! We have light AND the power to turn the light off without having to use the fuse box every time.

Brandon Rocks!!

It's great to know that we have such amazing friends and I can only hope that we can return the favours.

* This myth was actually busted by Mythbusters