The old lightbulb joke

Or why living in an old house keeps things interesting.

My house was built in 1820. We've come to expect that any renovation project will likely be interesting, require more than one trip to Home Depot or Lowes and will likely cost us more than the average home owner. In fact, when we start a project my husband and I generally place a bet as to how many Home Depot runs we'll have to do.

Today's project takes the cake.

Our porch has two lights, each with 3 lightbulbs -- the little 40W kind with the tiny bases.  In each of the lights two of the lightbulbs were out so Brian decided to change the lightbulbs before it started to get bitter cold. He went to Home Depot yesterday and came home with the wrong sized lightbulbs - the ones he bought had regular sized bases.

He went back today to exchange them. When he went to put them in he couldn't get the old bulbs out. They just kept spinning in the sockets. So it was out to Lowes we went. We picked out two new porch lights. Sadly the one Lowes had on clearance for $4.99 was sold out.

The first light took Brian about an hour to change out -- the screws didn't quite line-up. The second took 15 minutes.

So at our house it take 3 hours and $75 to change a lightbulb.