They have been focusing on electrical work all this week and part of last week, to the extent that every day when we come home, there are more wires poking out of the ceiling, and more little holes in the walls (in the kitchen, and popping up in other places too, like the guest bedroom, and even outside). Richard and I wandered around outside last night and noticed that they’ve pulled out huge chunks of the boards underneath the part of the kitchen that juts out over the under-deck area, exposing a veritable maze of pipes and hoses and wiring. Considering this house’s history, I have to wonder how much of what’s there is still in use, but it would be too much of a hassle to try to track every single line, so it’s just going to stay where it is, much like previous owners left at least two incarnations of embedded drip hoses all over the yard.

Of course, one of the downsides to having work done on wiring is that at some point, someone has to turn the power off to the section being tweaked, and considering the age of this house, it’s not unsurprising to discover that electrical circuits have not been set up quite like you might expect. Tuesday night is when we discovered that all the ceiling lights in the entire upper level are all apparently on one circuit, or connected to one wire, and that circuit was interrupted. We tried flicking circuit breakers randomly – some of them are labeled but although I suspect the labels were quite informative to the person who put them there, they don’t make much sense to those of us who weren’t around at the time – but nothing seemed to work. Luckily, all the wall plugs worked just fine, since that meant the fridge and the microwave and the computers all still had power. And after I did a ‘Oh hey, by the way, you might not be aware of this’ plea to the work crew Wednesday morning, by the time we got home that night, all the ceiling lights were back to normal.

The latest casualty of the kitchen renovation, however, is a bit harder to puzzle through, because this time it’s not the electrical stuff, it’s the phones. The phone line to the house is obviously still active, since the DSL is still working quite happily (always an important consideration in house with two nerds who are online ALL THE TIME), but none of the phones get a dial tone, and when I tried calling the house number with my cell phone, all I got was a busy signal. We dutifully unplugged and replugged the phones upstairs and downstairs, figuring maybe one of them was a little askew, enough to convince the system a receiver was off the hook, but that didn’t get us anywhere. Although, no, that’s not necessarily true – what it *did* tell us is that the guest bedroom downstairs is still hooked up to that phantom second line that we turned *off* when we moved in a year ago, but unfortunately getting a dial tone on a line whose number no one knows isn’t exactly useful.

During the renovation, the work crew has taken out a bunch of walls, and in some of those walls were two phone jacks and all their associated wiring. So I suspect that at some point today, when they were finishing up whatever it is they were doing with all the electrical wiring, someone also tried to deal with the errant phone wiring, and somehow, some wires got crossed. I figured whatever the problem was, it was probably up in the attic, and if we could just get up there and find the phone wire, maybe we could fix it ourselves.

Except that, as of today, we cannot get into the attic. They have installed the attic pull-down ladder in the guest room ceiling, since there is no longer any place to stash it in the ceiling over the kitchen space, but because the ceiling in the guest room is higher than the ceiling in the little enclosed back porch was, the ladder does not reach all the way to the ground, and until they install the necessary extensions to the ladder, getting up to the attic just isn’t going to happen.

So…right now we have no phones. The good news is that most anyone who might need to get in touch with us has our cell phone numbers, and Richard and I have fired off emails to our family letting them know why there is currently a permanent busy signal on our line, and I gave our contractor an ‘oh, hey, by the way’ call, and now all we can do is sit back and find the amusement in the fact that of all the utilities to lose during a kitchen renovation, phone service was one we did not expect.