How not to electrocute yourself

WARNING: If you are not competent to mess with your house's wiring, DON'T DO IT. Please find a nice, experienced electrician and pay them to do it for you. Trust me, it's not worth your life to mess with electrical stuff if you don't know what you're doing.

Having said that, we're by no means experts, but making wiring "safe" to work on is as simple as finding the breaker for the circuit you're working on and turning it off. Easy as pie. :)

Last weekend, we finally pulled down the overhead wiring run to the shed and the guest house. The plan is eventually to re-run the wiring underground when we build the new barn, which will be where the shed is currently located.

The problem: Dangling electrical lines supported by a rotted, leaning telephone pole. Definitely something we need to replace, and city code requires that we replace them underground.

Step 1/2 (not shown): Turn of breaker and test lines thoroughly to make sure you turned off the right one. Step 1: Disconnecting the lines from where attach to the house, under the eves of the hubby's workshop.

Step 2: Cut and disconnect wires from the shed. Bolt cutters can be helpful when you're cutting thick gauge copper wires.

Step 3 (also not shown): Pull down telephone pole. Step 4: Coil wires on the ground. Make sure Anie supervises.

The back looks much neater now that we don't have dangling power, telephone, and cable lines. Of course, we don't have electricity to either the shed or the guest house, but we aren't currently doing any work there. Once we have the barn design finalized, we'll be able to dig new trenches so we can run these utilities underground, but until then, we'll use extension cords if we need power in either of those locations.