Poll of the Day > What's the craziest thing you've seen when doing a home improvement project?

(+) Yeah! (+)

I was trying to swap a 3-way switch with a smart switch so I could control the lights with Alexa. But the wiring job in this 100 year old house just left me absolutely dumbfounded.

Some imbecile had taken the wires from the light fixture and connected them to the common terminal on both of the two switches. They then wired the hot and neutral wires to the two switched terminals on each switch.

Here's a quicky diagram: https://imgur.com/QfxoyzY

It worked, but in a really bad and dangerous way. If both switches were in the "hot" position, the light would go out (no neutral return path), but the fixture would still be live! Even just changing the light bulb could potentially be deadly!

And as if that wasn't bad enough, the light was wired into a different circuit from the rest of the room, so if you threw the breaker for the room and then saw that everything was off, you might assume that this light was cold as well when it was actually still live!

What's the craziest thing you've ever seen when doing a home improvement or DIY project?

My house is over 100 yrs old too. Fairly certain that a few of my fixtures still have cloth covered wires going to them.

When I did demo work on one of my bathrooms I found a crumbling newspaper with a 1913 date on it.

I also cemented a mouse into the wall of my basement when I was doing repair work.
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