Tales of Power

The cost of professional work -- and the gibes of a super-competent friend -- drive a former renter to take on the scariest of home renovation projects: electrical wiring

I reached the end of my self-confidence one May afternoon while I was standing in front of the breaker box in my basement, wanting nothing more than to cry. As happens perhaps too often in my life, the yen for tears arrived with an equally strong desire to shout, and I had in fact been yelling moments earlier as I marched down the basement stairs. The object of my anger: a palm-size dimmer switch that cost less than $15 and that I was convinced I should be able to install alone. I had an ultra-handy friend I could ask to help me, but that afternoon, calling Judah felt like a betrayal of myself.

After all, I had been finishing my own home improvement projects since I was in my 20s. In the spring of 2003, I spent a week's vacation spackling, sanding and painting my studio in Manhattan's East Village. The apartment was on the top floor of a four-story tenement. It had dingy, pockmarked walls and two windows covered with large metal security grates. It looked, in short, like a bohemian prison -- at least until I bought a bucket of plaster, several cans of white spray paint and gallons of adobe-colored Benjamin Moore. All through my vacation, I labored to transform it, rising at 6 in the morning to breathe assorted particles and fumes. At night, I'd drag myself -- giddy, headachy and exhausted -- back to sleep at a friend's apartment. By the end of the week, my jeans held so much paint and plaster that they cracked whenever I bent my legs.

The rewards lasted longer than the headaches. I received compliment after compliment on my suddenly "warm" and "cozy" apartment. Among my friends, the project was enough to consolidate my status as a Handy Person, and I relished the strength of my position. To be handy, I felt then, meant more than being mechanically adept. It implied overall competence and self-reliance, qualities that seemed to me especially important and fragile in those years. You will probably understand what I mean if I tell you that I undertook my first home improvement project -- the installation of a closet rod -- a few weeks after I broke up with my college boyfriend and moved, for the first time, into an apartment of my own.

In the months and years after I spackled and painted that studio, I built a bookcase, recaulked a tub, repainted the kitchenette, moved to Annapolis, married my husband and lost the sense that I was handy. I blame this change on my new surroundings. In New York, almost all of my friends had been renters. In Maryland, most of them were homeowners. To them, spackling and painting a room seemed as ordinary as hosting a barbecue. Their test for real handiness seemed to be: What makes you break down and call a contractor? And the person whose handiness they most admired was Judah, a cheerful ex-Naval officer who once spent three days installing his own hardwood floors and who often tried to joke us into more advanced DIY projects.

This change in standards did not immediately upset me. After a long commuter courtship, my then-fiance and I were finally living together in his one-bedroom rental, and though the paint in the bathroom was curling and the grout around the living room windows dropped in brittle gray bars every time we raised the sash, we focused on the view of the U.S. Naval Academy, the boats on the Chesapeake Bay and the plans for our wedding. Then, three months after our September ceremony, we bought our first home.

Like many first-time buyers, we moved into our house with grand plans for renovation. Though we repainted a few rooms ourselves, we paid two sweet-faced men almost $2,000 to refinish the old oak floors, and we planned to call in other professionals to remodel the upstairs and landscape the yard. When we realized we needed some electrical work done, I called a licensed electrician and took him on a tour of the house, pointing out ungrounded outlets, lurid ceiling fans that we wanted to replace, spots where a wall-mounted reading lamp would be ideal. Our most serious problem, I explained, was in the living room, where the track lights and an outlet had stopped working after the sweet-faced men finished the floors. The electrician unscrewed the wall plate over the dimmer, disconnected the switch, fixed the outlet, and called me a few days later with an estimate for the remaining repairs. It was more than $500, a price that seemed fair until my husband and I ran into Judah at our local pub.

"If you only knew how little the parts for this stuff cost," Judah said, laughing. "And you can do it all yourself! What do you need to do? Replace a dimmer switch? Invite me over for drinks, and I'll do it for you."

It took me days to convince my husband that this was a bad idea. Part of my opposition was reasonable. I knew that electrical work could be dangerous and that faulty wiring could start fires. In New York, electrical fires seemed to happen all the time. "Never leave the lights on when you go out," the previous renter warned me before I moved into my studio. The light in the bathroom, she explained, had once erupted in flames while she was working at her desk. And shortly before I left Gotham for good, a tenement around the corner was evacuated after its top two floors went up in smoke. But another part of my opposition was sulky cowardice. I remembered all too clearly my handy days in Manhattan, and telling Judah that I was scared of a project he clearly thought was easy felt like telling him I was incompetent. Instead, I glommed onto the position that some jobs should be touched only by professionals. Among these jobs, electrical work was No. 1.

Every evening as my husband and I sat in our semi-dark living room, reading by the light of our one functioning lamp, I thought about giving the electrician a ring. Yet, as time passed, I still couldn't set a date for the repairs. The reason: economics. In the middle of February, our furnace broke, costing us more than $800. A few weeks later, the washing machine choked, and a repairman fixed it in 15 minutes for more than $200. When spring arrived, the heating bills dropped from three to two digits, and I thought we were finally in the clear. Then grass began growing, and we realized for the first time that yards require lawn mowers, rakes, shovels, herbicide, compost and clippers.

To a pair of lifelong renters, it felt like discovering a dirty secret: Maintaining a house costs a lot of money. After years of demanding that landlords handle stuck locks, clogged bathtubs, noisy radiators and dozens of other repairs, we were suddenly footing the bill for everything. Finally, we joked, we understood why our fathers policed the house against high thermostat settings. March turned to April. Our home renovation stash turned into a home maintenance account. I began to worry that we'd still be sitting in a gloomy living room when my mother visited at the end of May.

In the meantime, Judah and his girlfriend renovated their entire kitchen. Together, they designed a new layout and knocked down a wall to expand the square footage. They hung their own wood cabinets, and Judah rewired their lights and hooked up all the appliances. I had heard from other friends that he was impressively skillful, but I'd never seen his work firsthand, so I'd assumed that his reputation was exaggerated. The cabinets must be a little crooked, I figured, the floorboards slightly rough. I was wrong. One night they invited us over for dinner. As I stared at the perfectly aligned cabinets and the seamlessly recessed lighting, I felt foolish. Everything looked perfect, and they'd managed to do the whole job for $18,000, including a new set of professional-grade appliances. A few days later, I drove to my local hardware store and bought a dimmer switch.

I'd be lying if I said that my fear of electrical work had disappeared so quickly. In the days before that shopping trip, I spent hours on the Internet searching for a class on electrical wiring, turning up nothing except a professional training course that cost $465. While I was online, I also checked out some home improvement Web sites; several of them provided step-by-step instructions on how to install the switch. Yet the online articles left me more confused than ever. While one site confirmed Judah's assessment that replacing a dimmer switch "is one of the simpler electrical projects," another warned that elec-tricity "can be a silent killer."