Monday, March 1, 2010

The house is on fire.

I have been having some bad luck with fire in my house. First I almost burn the house down making a pop-tart, and last night, my light switch tries to do the same thing.

Last evening, I was doing laundry (washer/dryer is in the garage) and every time I went outside and flipped on the light, I heard a weird noise coming from the light switch. Hrm. I thought nothing of it and continued on my way. But last last night I smell something. It smells like burning plastic. What the hell?

And then I notice it. The wall surrounding the light switch is black with soot. I feel it to make sure it's not hot and I run to grab a screwdriver to open it up to see what it going on. The inside was a big piece of melted plastic. From what I could see, the only thing stopping it from catching fire was the metal housing. Whew!

So now I sit waiting for the electrician. I'm hoping he's able to replace it without having to rewire the entire thing.

Thank you to the powers that be for not allowing my house to burn down.

10 comments:

areyoukiddingme said...

Wow! Lucky break, Nancy. I hope you don't have any further electrical problems!

Anonymous said...

You are so LUCKY girl ! Hopefully they can fix it !

Julie said...

That is so crazy. I hope it's an easy fix.

Lisa said...

Glad to know you and the house are safe. House fires are not at all fun!

Our baseboard heater did the same thing to us about a year ago. We have no idea why and it never happened again...

Jendeis said...

Wow! Hope the fix is quick, correct and cheap (though JD tells me that one can only get two out of three on those). :)

Jenera said...

This happened in the kids' room. The light switch was very hot and all the wiring up the wall. somewhere along the line the wires were burning and shorting out. Freaked me right out. But the landlord got it all squared away so no more worries of fire.

Jenera said...

Oh I forgot, your story reminds me of when in our old place, the A/C was plugged in on the patio and one day I was taking the trash out and the outlet and plug exploded and caught on fire. Yeah, that was scary.

carrie said...

Ah! Scary! We had a similar thing happen a few months ago...

For years we had a set of those vibraty things for your mattress and one night I laid down to go to sleep and thought I kept smelling something hot. I'd sit up and sniff the air and wouldn't smell it, then lay down and it'd be there again. I moved my pillow and got a huge whiff of that electrical burn smell. Woke my husband up and we touched the motor box and it was hot!

Thank God for my highly sensitive sniffer. Hubby didn't smell it at all until he sniffed the motor box. Can you imagine having your bed catch on fire... yikes!

Mrs. Gamgee said...

Oy! I hope that it can be fixed quickly and inexpensively... what a scare!

jenn said...

Yikes! electrical fires are freaking scary!

When we bought our house the first thing we did was rip out the old carpet.. that they also ran up the baseboards that had original outlets in. With carpet fibers going into the outlets & we pulled out half of them singed. No idea how they didn't burn the house down before we ever got here!