Dear electrician

I know that my house has been ill-favored by the code compliance gods, and all previous work was done by monkeys who had been blinded by a combination of hubris and feces. But it’s my house, and I want to like it. So please be temperate in your immediate verbal assessment. The evolving color in your face (previously a healthy pink, now white headed towards green) is sufficiently expressive. And trust me, there has been positive progress. The panel is no longer quite the circuit breaker ceviche that it once was. A lot of leaky old wiring has been removed or replaced. And we started a wiring chart of the house, so you can see which circuits are truly overloaded instead of having to guess based on the scorch marks.

We’ve tried to come up with a priority list and a wish list. Perhaps some items on the wish list are more achievable than we’ve feared, and perhaps your weekly rate is more affordable than your daily or hourly rate. We won’t know unless you tell us.

We know you’ll find some unexpected problems. Tradespeople find unexpected problems whenever they work on our house. Hell, they find unexpected problems whenever they drive down a street near our house. Just keep us informed, and remember that while we’re the present owners, we neither designed nor built the house.