Divine intervention (again)
Sometimes things happen, that are so unlikely that they can only be explained by some kind of divine intervention. We’ve had two of those occasions recently during our renovation project. The first one, and most unlikely, was the impeccable timing of our electrician who arrived here just in time to install new wiring in my office at the same time as the construction workers had torn down the old roof. To have a house without a roof is obviously a bad idea, so this type of work is dependent on weather conditions. Then they work very fast to remove and replace the ceiling in a day. So, we’re talking about a time window of 4-6 hours, maximum, when the roof is gone (i.e. half of it). And there will never be a better time to reinstall the electrical wiring. I booked my electrician months ago, with a gut feeling that “this day will probably be the day when the roof is removed”. And he arrived with the precision of a Japanese bullet train, exactly when the roof was gone.
I can’t fathom how I could hit such a tiny time window with a sniper’s accuracy. When you throw the weather dependency in the mix, it becomes seriously unlikely. We had heavy rain the day before, so the teardown of the old roof was postponed by a day, which made the schedules synchronize beautifully. Now, why is this a big deal? Surely, you can replace some electrical wiring even with a roof in place? Yes, that’s true. But my wife’s grandfather had a funny habit of cutting corners wherever possible. So, when he installed a new wooden ceiling in the house, he simply didn’t bother to open up access points to the electrical junctions. He wasn’t planning on having a light or outlet there anyway, so let’s just hide it above the ceiling. The problem arose when I wanted to install grounded wall outlets in the house this summer. The electrician couldn’t finish the job because he could not find the junction points. After some hours, he found one of them and exposed it to the room again with a hole saw. But there were more of them… And we had to give up because there is a point of diminishing returns when it starts to get cheaper to just replace the whole damn, thing instead of repairing it.
Crouching in a cramped cold attic full of old mice poop and dirt, doing electrical renovations isn’t the nicest work environment. To do the same thing when the roof is removed is exceptionally easy. There would never be a better way to figure out the existing electrical installation layout than during the renovations. And it would save a lot of time when installing the modern stuff as well. I suspect that the situation described above will sound familiar to anyone working with house renovations. The previous owner of a house, let’s call him McGyver, has done a lot of DIY without documenting anything. It was all in McGyver’s head, and then he brought his secrets with him to the grave. Then it is up to the new house owner, let’s call him Sherlock Holmes, to figure out what on earth is going on. With just about everything. Well, anyway, the electrical issues have now been (mostly) sorted out. Only a couple of days work left for the professional now, but all the urgent and dangerous stuff have been fixed.
The other divine intervention was during the replacement of the ventilation system. We had some problems when ordering a new kitchen fan, due to the very shallow kitchen cabinets. They wouldn’t fit regular 280 mm deep units, so we had to find some special model that could fit in just 270 mm. We finally found one, which was not in stock of course, and a couple of weeks delivery time. Then, the ventilation guys got an opportunity to help us out a couple of weeks earlier than expected. That was a lovely surprise, until we realized that the kitchen fan would not be here by the time when they were supposed to install it. But we were out of our patience with the old ventilation unit that sounded like a cargo ship on idle. So, we told them to come over and do the ventilation work ASAP. Within minutes, I get an SMS that my kitchen fan had been shipped on Friday (about one week earlier than expected). The ventilation dudes showed up the following Monday. An hour or two after lunch, I get a new SMS that the fan is ready for pickup nearby. I go there, pick it up, drive home, open the box and hand it over to the workers literally the minute they finish work on the ducts and FTX unit. The new kitchen fan gets installed and we were done.
There’s a Swedish saying that “en olycka kommer sällan ensam”, which in english translates to something like: “An accident seldom comes alone”. It is obvious to me, that we need something similar with a positive note, because it is just as, or perhaps even more true. But these strokes of extreme luck seem to be easier to forget than when we have bad experiences.
Cherish them instead.
Oh, and my wife suggested I should change careers from Acoustician to Construciton site manager, due to my recently discovered sixth sense of logistics. 😂