Saturday, October 13, 2012

reaching the electric panel

Since I moved in on August 21, the electric panel has been inaccessible due to boxes.

Like this:

I've been working on making a path to the panel for several weeks. Since I can't reach any of the lights on that side of the basement, I could only work for a little while in the late afternoon. (Not that I had hours of free time at other times of day, you understand.)

From the laundry area head towards the old refrigerator:


Then turn right:


Halfway along the wall is my goal:


And beyond it, yet another goal:


Four boxes of dishes which may mean I can stop eating out of freezer-to-microwave lunch containers (which have their conveniences if you have to have only two or three things to put food in.) I hope to find my glass jars of flour and sugar in there, too, and then I can actually bake things!

But the important part of reaching the electric panel, with cold weather approaching, was to be able to try my electric heater in the bathroom and know that if it blew a circuit breaker, I could reset it. It did not, I am happy to say, but with 7.5 amps on a 15 amp circuit containing I knew not what, I wasn't willing to risk it.


You can tell it has been with me a while. I bought it in 1971 when I was in my first apartment in college, but the styling suggests it wasn't a new design then. The rust is from living alternately in damp bathrooms and in basements when not needed. After forty years it can still heat a small room more than ten degrees Fahrenheit in five minutes. (It's a mere child, of course, compared to the refrigerator pictured above, which was made in 1953 and has never had a service call. I cherish reliable appliances.)

3 comments:

  1. Goals are good.
    Your basement looks familiar. Kinda like my house. (I don't have a basement, unfortunately.) The difference is, I've been in this house for 15 years.

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  2. Don't scare me like that. I hope to have things mostly unpacked in closer to fifteen months. Some of it I hope to have unpacked by Christmas, like the decorations, and the wrapping paper. (I've wrapped two baby presents in the paper the movers used to wrap fragile stuff, decorated with fabric paint.) But of course, some of what is in the basement has been in the boxes it's in for more than forty years in my parents' basement. That part is not very urgent.

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  3. I know all about making paths through the belongings to get to different areas. Sadly mine are due to the fact I own too much stuff for a one bedroom apartment. Considering what I've pared down from when I had a house though, I'm doing pretty darned well.

    It is good to hang onto things that still work, after all, what's a bit of rust if you can get warm in a hurry?

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