I had a blank electrical plate installed and the guys at home improvement had an issue.
The blank plate was a very popular idea when I was growing up. It was a way to put your house on the market without the expense and hassle of having to remove the exterior siding, install a new roof, and replace the interior trim. It was also a very fun project to work with because it was all DIY! There was no hiring a contractor, no waiting for the roof to get delivered, no having to cut, drill, or otherwise replace your siding and trim.
When I think of the blank plate idea, I think of a house that is a little too perfect in every one of its aspects. It is too neat. It is too easy to go around the house and trim the edges of the roof, for example. It is too easy to take the roof off, clean up the siding, and put it back together. It is not practical to put your house on the market and then change it all out.
The blank plate idea is a great way to get around the house so that you don’t have to do anything. That is, if it is practical. In our house, we had that roof for about 20 years. It was covered in copper and it had some great curves. It looked very cool and it was actually pretty comfortable. Then one day, one of the guys in our crew decided he wanted to get rid of it.
One day he decided to call the owner of the house, and told them he would pay them $100 for their “blank” roof. Of course, the roof guy looked at the blank plate, saw what it did, and decided it was a good thing to keep. So he took it to the roof guy, and the roof guy took it to the builder and the builder took it to the contractor and the contractor took it to the electrician.
Electrical work is a great excuse to break a rule. We had a contractor do a few electrical projects and we saw one of these plates come off and drop to the ground. The contractor quickly moved it back on to the plate. The builder and electrician took care of it.
The builder said he had to have three electrical contractors on site for his job, but he also said that it’s an “integral part of the building process,” so it’s totally worth it.
That’s one of my favorite parts about this story. I LOVE when a “contractor” is the builder.
This is one of the more common “rules” that we have been asked to break. It’s not that this is a hard rule to break, but it is something that you’d usually have to go along with. You wouldn’t want to get a job that didn’t include taking care of that plate. It isn’t something that can be done in a second.
The reason it is an integral part of the construction process is because the plate is not the job that the electrical company had to do. The electrical company did the work. The plate was the part that the contractors had to install.