Oooh shiney new electrical panel!

(How sad is it that I'm excited about this shit?)

No more knob and tube circuits (there were only two though), and no more supid fuses and trying to figure out which one had blown (in the dark, of course). I could never, for the life of me tell the difference it seemed from a blown fuse and one that wasn't blown. Plus, you had to pull all of them out to figure . And it only cost us an arm and a leg!

Oh, and here's a list of things NOT to look for in an electrician:

• Complains about "all the stairs" in your 1 1/2 storey (tiny) house. Points to his abundant belly and blames you for making him lose weight.
  
• Can't figure out why a wire doesn't seem to be threading through when there's a vent in the way you've pointed out to him twice.
  
• Finally says 'hmm well I guess we can thread the wire through that hole in the floor" about 15 minutes after you suggested it the first time.
  
• Leaves a mess of unmentionable proportion in the toilet. For this Dave suggested we tie his pay to the toilet brush for him to fine.
• Leaves little shards of wire everywhere for you, your partner and your animals to find with their feet.

And so there only remains one old wire that was part of the knob and tube wiring in the house that said lazy electrician should be here on Monday to fix (in theory).

Plus, if he can figure it out (this one's still up for debate, we'll have an electrical socket in the bathroom installed... won't that be handy! It'll make the hair straightener obsession I now have much more manageable.

update: lazy electrician arrived Monday morning but was unable to find a way to fish a cable to the basement, so now we just have a hole in our bathroom wall, no plug. Didn't figure he could find a way to fish cable downstairs to get rid of the last bit of old wiring so we left that too.