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In Which Our House is Sort of Repaired
Aug. 11th, 2017 11:40 amLast Tuesday, Kimberly went to pop some corn in the microwave and the circuit popped instead. Or that's what it seemed at first.
I poked my head out the door, looked around carefully from druggies from People's Park (this morning's homeless hijinks: an ice-pick stabbing in front of Ben & Jerry's in downtown!), and when the way was clear scooted out to our electric box and flipped the switches that were most likely for the kitchen. (They're very poorly labeled, or unlabeled, and the circuits aren't entirely logical.) I came back inside and K. told me that she'd been able to pop corn again for several more seconds, then it shut off once more.
Further investigation revealed the problem was the outlet. If it was used for power for more than a few seconds, it went out. Not good. It kind of made me nervous, but for the moment we extended our microwave extension cord to run to the next outlet in the kitchen, which we'd replaced some years ago due to flakiness (hmmm ... I sense a pattern), and popcorn was popped.
So Wednesday I went to our fixit website of late, Thumbtack. I put out a request to fix our bad outlet, plus a problem we'd been having with a switch, which rebounded whenever you pushed it down too hard. And since I was there, I put in a second request for a tile repairman for our continued downstairs bathroom problems, after I didn't get any Thumbtack response a week or two earlier, and a third request for a handyman to fix a variety of holes and cracks that have appeared in our walls over the last 17 years.
Within an hour I had someone offering to do both the electrical and handyman work. I was a little leery of someone who wasn't a full-time electrician, but his profile listed electrician as his main category in Thumbtack. He also had good reviews, so I figured, good enough.
Sort of.
Our handyman ended up spending around six hours at our house last Thursday and Friday. The amount of work he did was uninspiring, as was the quality.
Certainly, our house has challenges. It's over a hundred years old and it's had bad work done in past times. So the bad outlet was apparently very tightly packed and hard to work with. The bad switch (and associated outlet) was jammed in between uncut tiles, had a faceplate that wasn't really the right size and after it got accidentally shattered, we learned that that size was no longer being made.
But our handyman also didn't seem that good. Oh, he could do the basic work. He clearly knew how to rewire electrical wires. And he knew the basic techniques for patching our holes in the wall. But, given anything more challenging, like a switch and outlet where there wasn't a cover that could easily slip into the old spot, he was at wit's end, leaving me to troubleshoot. And he was also very sloppy. (If I wanted sloppy, unfocused home improvement work, I'd do it myself). And, he was also very messy. I spent almost an hour cleaning up after his first day of work, seriously messing up my Thursday evening's schedule.
After those six hours of work, we have:
Sigh.
I mean, things are improved. Our two big electrical problems aren't problems any more. Some bare wall is covered. But I'm thinking about presentation nowadays, and most of this work fails the presentable-enough-to-increase-the-value-of-a-house test, to various degrees.
Our biggest lesson out of this is: don't use Thumbtack. I think we've gotten four people from them, and three have been disappointing. There was the handyman who built us OK shelves (but failed a little bit on that presentation), but just threw up his hands over our bathroom problems after working on them for a while and even cutting holes in our wall; there was the other handyman who worked on the bathroom and made the situation worse by grouting over our grout with a different color, which then started washing away weeks later; and there was thi electrician-handyman who did OK work but was very bad at finishing and polish. We did get a good roofer from Thumbtack, who did solid work on our leaking back roof and resealing our repaired garage roof, but 25% aren't the odds I want when having someone work on our house, especially when presentation increasingly matter.
I poked my head out the door, looked around carefully from druggies from People's Park (this morning's homeless hijinks: an ice-pick stabbing in front of Ben & Jerry's in downtown!), and when the way was clear scooted out to our electric box and flipped the switches that were most likely for the kitchen. (They're very poorly labeled, or unlabeled, and the circuits aren't entirely logical.) I came back inside and K. told me that she'd been able to pop corn again for several more seconds, then it shut off once more.
Further investigation revealed the problem was the outlet. If it was used for power for more than a few seconds, it went out. Not good. It kind of made me nervous, but for the moment we extended our microwave extension cord to run to the next outlet in the kitchen, which we'd replaced some years ago due to flakiness (hmmm ... I sense a pattern), and popcorn was popped.
So Wednesday I went to our fixit website of late, Thumbtack. I put out a request to fix our bad outlet, plus a problem we'd been having with a switch, which rebounded whenever you pushed it down too hard. And since I was there, I put in a second request for a tile repairman for our continued downstairs bathroom problems, after I didn't get any Thumbtack response a week or two earlier, and a third request for a handyman to fix a variety of holes and cracks that have appeared in our walls over the last 17 years.
Within an hour I had someone offering to do both the electrical and handyman work. I was a little leery of someone who wasn't a full-time electrician, but his profile listed electrician as his main category in Thumbtack. He also had good reviews, so I figured, good enough.
Sort of.
Our handyman ended up spending around six hours at our house last Thursday and Friday. The amount of work he did was uninspiring, as was the quality.
Certainly, our house has challenges. It's over a hundred years old and it's had bad work done in past times. So the bad outlet was apparently very tightly packed and hard to work with. The bad switch (and associated outlet) was jammed in between uncut tiles, had a faceplate that wasn't really the right size and after it got accidentally shattered, we learned that that size was no longer being made.
But our handyman also didn't seem that good. Oh, he could do the basic work. He clearly knew how to rewire electrical wires. And he knew the basic techniques for patching our holes in the wall. But, given anything more challenging, like a switch and outlet where there wasn't a cover that could easily slip into the old spot, he was at wit's end, leaving me to troubleshoot. And he was also very sloppy. (If I wanted sloppy, unfocused home improvement work, I'd do it myself). And, he was also very messy. I spent almost an hour cleaning up after his first day of work, seriously messing up my Thursday evening's schedule.
After those six hours of work, we have:
- An outlet that's working again, and just slightly crooked.
- A switch and plug that may look better than they did before (and work cirrectly now), but which aren't wholly professional, and where the plug isn't totally stable in the wall.
- Six or so patched holes, none of which are painted (because he couldn't get us a paint match) and a couple of which look very rough (due to sloppy work and a lack of texturing).
Sigh.
I mean, things are improved. Our two big electrical problems aren't problems any more. Some bare wall is covered. But I'm thinking about presentation nowadays, and most of this work fails the presentable-enough-to-increase-the-value-of-a-house test, to various degrees.
Our biggest lesson out of this is: don't use Thumbtack. I think we've gotten four people from them, and three have been disappointing. There was the handyman who built us OK shelves (but failed a little bit on that presentation), but just threw up his hands over our bathroom problems after working on them for a while and even cutting holes in our wall; there was the other handyman who worked on the bathroom and made the situation worse by grouting over our grout with a different color, which then started washing away weeks later; and there was thi electrician-handyman who did OK work but was very bad at finishing and polish. We did get a good roofer from Thumbtack, who did solid work on our leaking back roof and resealing our repaired garage roof, but 25% aren't the odds I want when having someone work on our house, especially when presentation increasingly matter.