An electrician I certainly am not, but I was told anyone can swap out a light fixture. “There are black wires and white wires. Just don’t cross them, and you’ll do fine,” my carpenter friend told me. So I took on the kitchen fixture with determination. After a few minutes of ‘I think I have it, got it, tighten here, screw there,’ I had indeed swapped out the fixture. It even worked when I threw the switch.
Feeling a new sense of DIY confidence, I figured I could handle the living room fixture as well. After all, it’s just a matter of black and white wires, right? Then I took down the old fixture I saw the now familiar black and white wires, and — what’s this – a red wire? I hadn’t heard about that. Well, how different could it be? I made the mistake of not checking with my carpenter friend, and started to unscrew with abandon. POW! Flash! Shriek! It could have been worse; I only ended up scaring myself and tripping the circuit breaker (no, I hadn’t turned it off before I started to work).
The red wire was an unexpected turn of events. What is your first inclination when you run across the ‘red wires’ of your life? Do you move ahead with reckless abandon, or do you stop to check with the Carpenter – Jesus — who is waiting to show us the way?
Margaret, age 39, Rochester
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That’s very cool. I just put a light in our chicken coop and then had to change it to a plug in light and put an outlet in the chicken coop. I tripped the circuit breaker when hooking it all up so when I tried it, it didn’t work… (Once my father in law hit the breaker it lit up like Christmas… that is if people only used one Eco-friendly swirly light bulb in a chicken coop for Christmas.)
Thank you for the encouragement.