Not A Quick Fix

      I have a rule in my house. Do not say that any repair will be quick. Making that statement is like lowering your pants and waving your bare ass in front of Murphy, the god of "Ha! Ha! Guess What Else Just Went Wrong!"

      See, I don't know if you realize this but, kids play. All the time and everywhere. It's perfectly natural and lets them flourish in their habitat (I think I read this in a National Geographic special about wildebeasts). However, playing can mean games. Specifically in this case, a game that involved throwing pillows across a bedroom to each other without a care for the ceiling fan. (You know where I'm going with this...)

      Not only did said pillow break the glass globe of the fixture, but it somehow managed to kill the unit entirely. (My two wildebeasts were properly contrite over the murder.) At first, the crime didn't seem heinous. My local hardware store had a fan on sale and Google told me that it would be a quick fix that anyone could do.

      Either Google is a liar or it just never accounted for my house.

      With the power off and the fan's corpse removed, I made a discovery. Old houses suck. Write it down. OLD HOUSES SUCK. Not only were the wires not safely contained in an outlet box or surrounded by a few pieces of wood but they were also covered with tattered cloth (to be fair, this is how things were done). Also, whoever installed the fan hadn't affixed it to anything. You read that right. The only thing keeping the fan in place for years had been the wires and plaster. Nice.

      What was supposed to take an hour ended up taking an entire summer. A summer where my children slept in the back room while their bedroom was gutted. A summer where I learned that all of the wiring in the house was going to need to be replaced. Spools of wire, tools, wood, plaster, and band aids took their toll on my bank account.

      Maybe I should add another rule. Do not think that fixing something will be cheap.

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