who is shocked?

This girl:

yes I work in my PJs.

Why am I shocked? Well, because I successfully completed my first ever electrical project.

And for the record … we are speaking figuratively shocked, not literally (hardy har har).

The project: change out the electrical cord on our dryer.

So here is the thing … we have spent the last several years in old houses. Old houses come with old outlets, with three prongs. And so we bought a dryer many moons ago with a plug that had three prongs. We did well in kindergarden and thus understand that you cannot easily fit 4 things in 3 holes. #freakinggeniuses

Except then we moved to a brand new apartment with a 4-prong outlet. A very nice little man who single-handely carried our dryer up the stairs implied that he might be able to change out our cord if we would be willing to lighten our wallets a little.

And we did. Without a second of hesitation.

And then karma hit like a bitch. We moved back to a house … with a three prong outlet … and a dryer that now had a four prong cord. (Try to keep up)

can’t we just drill another hole in this thing?

What made us think we could fix this ourselves? The most dangerous combination you could find – a little confidence and a lotta Google.

First step was to get the necessary plug. To instill confidence, here is the transcript of my dialogue with the nice aging hippy man who worked at Home Depot:

Me: I need a cord for my washer.

Home Depot Hippy Man: You mean your dryer?

Me: Um, yeah, I guess. So it has four thingies and I need one with three thingies.

Home Depot Hippy Man: You mean prongs?

I did not do anything to instill more confidence from that point forward. And so my Home depot friend whipped out a sharpie and decided diagrams were in order:

roadmap to success … or electrocution.

I gotta say … I have many many (many) faults, but I follow directions very well. And those directions are:

• Unplug the current cord. (no, seriously) Unscrew the back panel where the current cord is sticking out of.

• Unscrew the 3 screws that hold in the four connectors (normally there would be 4 connectors, but since our’s was originally a 3 prong dryer, we got a freebie):

• Pull out your new fancy-pants three prong cord. The only thing that matters is the the center wire (the neutral one) is connected to the middle port (not the technical term). All three sides should be screwed in, and the you can replace the back panel.

• Oh, and make sure the stress relief bracket is in fact relieving stress – these take different forms, but basically you want to clamp it onto the cord in such a way that if your moody cat starts playing tug of war with the cord, it will not pull the cords out of the port.

This should go without saying (you are all smart people … and did you see how many times I used the term “thingie” in this post?) but I am not an electrician and you probably should not follow these directions. But they worked for me …

It’s electric! (boogie woogie woogie)