Hey guys,

For some of you this is going to be the most boring post ever. Weird, considering the exciting title. I really wanted to post about this though, so just go with it.

Are you ready for this?? I, Holly Bryn Sunderland, changed out all the outlets in our kitchen! Woah! So now you’re like, “the outlet covers??” No, no. The actual outlet piece. Basically if I’m ever looking for a career change, I can add electrician to the short list. Now you’re probably wondering what could have possessed me to do such a thing. Let me show you.

Gross, right? So even if I could have gotten over the fact that we had ivory outlets that didn’t match the white plate covers, they were just nasty. Especially that last photo – I have no idea what that green stuff is and I didn’t really care to find out. So I gave myself a little pep talk and got down to business.

Let me tell you what I did. Basically when you’re changing out an electrical outlet, you just put all the wires in the exact same spot on the new outlet. Mind blown, right? I found the best way to do that is to go one wire at a time. Easy peasy.

One of the downsides to changing out the outlets was that it took two and a half hours! Mostly due to the fact that someone decided that 5 outlets in the kitchen sounded like a good idea. (How many kitchen appliances were you planning on buying??) My favorite is this wall because there are two right next to each other. You know, just in case you were planning on making waffles and toast and a smoothie for breakfast and you needed to do it all on this side of the counter. Phew! Dodged that bullet. Other downsides, I found out that the breaker that controls this part of our house is unlabeled, so I basically had to shut power off to the entire house. Also, I had to buy a fancy wire stripper/cutter that cost more than I thought it would.

I’m pretty happy with the results though so all the struggle was worth it! I also took this opportunity to replace the outlet covers and add outlet extenders to bring the outlets out to the tile face. Sounds hard but it’s literally like these little plastic pieces that you place behind the outlet screw. Super easy.

Remember the weird green outlet?? Look how pretty it is now! I may have maybe accidentally wired this gfci upside down the first time and had a minor panic attack when none of the outlets worked the first time I tested them. But I can neither confirm nor deny this.

So that’s pretty much it. On a side note, this blog could have also been titled “You know you’re an adult when… you get super excited about new electrical outlets.”  I think it makes a world of difference and looks a whole lot better than before. What do you think?

Thanks for reading,