mad maison

Transitioning from a nicely apportioned, full-service apartment building to a 100-year-old house that needs a lot of work is an interesting experience.  We can accept that we’re only living in two rooms and can’t remember what it feels like to have a rug underfoot. But we cannot accept the pull-chain light in the bathroom. Allow me to explain. The bathroom upstairs has some “period” details. Like the claw-foot tub that if given the opportunity, Duckie the cat would spend all day and night hidden under. So we keep the door to said bathroom closed. This wouldn’t be a big deal if not for the pull-chain light. Do you remember these? Perhaps from when you visited your grandmother’s house in the 1970’s (because by now she’s updated it). It also wouldn’t be such a big deal if the pull-chain light was somewhere other than the middle of the room right over the shower rod. Or if we didn’t have 1,000 year old plaster walls that would infect us with typhus and destroy our humor if we tried to rip them up to install a light switch (you would have thought that Gerard the electrician saw a ghost dropping a hair dryer into a tub filled with water when we asked if he could install said switch). So by week two in the new mad maison, we were ready for one of those new-fangled geeky appliances known as a light switch. We had dreams of going into the bathroom in the middle of the night and not stubbing our toe and stumbling into the walls while keeping our legs crossed looking for the darn chain. Like Joan of Arc or Deborah from the Torah, I was motivated to act.

I saw a light emanating from my laptop. It led me to google. And the internet spoke to me. Through a fellow blogger who long since abandoned her post, I found out about the wireless light socket switch. I’ve seen (and used) similar devices for outlets, but did not know that you could get such a device for a light socket. And so, my friend amazon.com fulfilled our needs and sent us the apparatus. Of course, we had to switch the light fixture out before we could use it–but once we had everything set up the fog lifted and the angels sang (or maybe that was just a cat meowing from outside the bathroom door). We can now walk into the bathroom and turn on the light with a flip of a switch. It might not be as good as an elevator, porter, and super on call, but it will placate us for a while, at least. Until we find the next little thing.

who knew this little device could inspire such prose?

OK, perhaps we’re grasping at straws, but mad is feeling pretty good today. We’ve been working hard over the past few weeks: scrubbing and scraping, and scrubbing some more. And while mad has finished tasks in the legal sense (scraping wallpaper off the living room walls, setting up our home network), today we completed something that doesn’t have another chapter. Our doorbell was broken. And when you live in a house with a scary metal gate over the front door (another task that’s almost complete), you realize having a doorbell helps. So today, thanks to spirit and wit (and a screwdriver), mad replaced the doorbell with one that actually works. Now, to say that mad completed this task is a little bit of a stretch. Mike is the member of mad that purchased the doorbell, he’s also the person who balanced himself at the top of the stepladder and removed the old, rusted doorbell, and he’s the one who installed the new doorbell. However, Mike says I participated in critical ways: the online research to diagnose the problem and suggest a remedy, reading the documentation, and handing Mike the screwdriver when he stood perched atop the stepladder. Of course, I also completed the test ringing of said bell. I admit, Mike is the real hero of mad today, but I’m happy to serve as witness and documentarian for this historic milestone.

Our completed doorbell project; please ignore the wallpaper, that's a different project.