Just call me Sparky
It’s funny how completing the little jobs that you’ve been putting off for ages, but aren’t really that difficult, can really make your day. If they involve something you didn’t know you could do until you tried, it adds about 100 bonus points.
Two things in our house have needed fixing since we moved in over a year ago. The first was the kitchen light. It was one of those ‘curved arm holding spotlights’ things, with tungsten spotlights, rather than halogen ones. Quite apart from being thoroughly blessed by the Ugly Fairy, two of the light fittings had a fault, and would sulkily blow bulbs as soon as you replaced them. Consequently, our kitchen had several very gloomy spots.
It’s one of those things that you look at many times a day and subconsciously think “I must get around to fixing that”, before you go on your way with a slight but gnawing feeling of things being unfinished. This week, we finally got around to going to a shop and buying a new light. Ridiculously, that was what was holding the whole thing back: once we’d got our shiny new halogen light, we were raring to put it up. We’d never attempted to replace a ceiling light fitting before, but it turned out to be very easy, once we’d worked out which of the many unlabelled fuses in the fuse box controlled the lighting ring. A few minutes work, some tutting at the messy nest of wiring stuffed into the ceiling space (just like real electricians!), and some work with a screwdriver, and it was done. When we replaced the fuse and switched on the light to find our kitchen bathed in lovely, clean, bright light, it felt like a genuine achievement, and a disproportionately large load lifted from our shoulders.
