A Year on Ladybug Farm - Donna Ball [44]
Lenny/Cal led the way across the living room into the small enclosed sunporch that adjoined it on the back side of the house. The low ceiling and marble tile floors suggested this room might once have been an open patio. Now the banks of windows on three sides—all of which were encased in wooden frames that were suffering from dry rot and covered in flaking white paint—filled the room with morning light and made it hot enough to bake bread. Even the ladybugs that swarmed across the window panes were dropping, shells-down, onto the sills from apparent heat exhaustion. For this reason, the ladies hadn’t yet found a use for the room, and it was empty now except for the three men in sweat-stained blue uniforms with names stenciled on the pockets who variously squatted on the floor and lounged against the wall near an electrical outlet whose faceplate had been removed.
“See this here?” Lenny/Cal hunkered down and pointed at something in the outlet with the tip of his screwdriver.
Cici saw nothing, but she made a sound of interest as she blotted her forehead with the back of her arm.
“What you got here,” explained Lenny/Cal with authority, “is your reversed polarity. Same all through here. Way I figure it, this room was built onto and whoever did the wiring did a half-assed job. If I was you I’d check the rest of the house, too. Who knows what we’re like to find.”
The other three men nodded sage agreement.
Cici said, “And how much will that cost to fix?”
He looked thoughtful as he straightened up. “Well now, that all depends. We go through, have to pull wires, replace all the outlets . . . parts, labor, three men upwards of two weeks . . . that’s not counting construction work, mind you, if we have to cut into walls . . . could run oh, two, three thousand more.”
Cici gazed at him without expression. “Okay,” she said in a moment. “Let me see if I’ve got this right. The original job you were hired for was going to cost six hundred dollars. Next thing I know we’re replacing the fuse box for a thousand dollars, and burying a ground wire for another thousand. Now you’re talking about another three thousand dollars. Let me ask you something. How much does an electrical outlet cost?”
“Well now, I’m not saying it’s for absolute we’d have to replace them all—”
“They’re $2.98 each,” Cici supplied for him, “and it takes approximately three minutes to change one out. Even if you replaced a hundred outlets in this house at your outrageous rate, we’re talking less than five hundred dollars, now aren’t we?”
He started to sputter. “Well, I don’t know how you’re figuring that. Besides, that’s not even counting the wire—”
“Which is fifty cents a foot for 120,” she returned, “and which I did not ask you to do.” Sweat trickled down her sides and began to chafe behind the knees of her paint-splattered jeans. “Mr.—um”—she glanced at his shirt pocket and decided—“Lenny, I think we need to come to an understanding, here. All I want is a separate 220 circuit installed for a heat pump and air conditioner.”
“You’re gonna have to upgrade your box,” he insisted defensively.
“I understand that,” she replied, as patiently as she could. Another trickle of sweat crawled down her spine and she twitched her shoulders against it. “What I don’t understand is why it’s going to cost a thousand dollars.”
He grinned at his three compadres. They grinned back. Then he grinned at her, hitched up his pants, rocked back on his heels, and began to explain. “Now there, young lady, there’s a lot about electric you don’t know. Lots that can’t be found in your Sears, Roebuck catalogue. You start dealing with live wires, you’re gonna be talking about some money. You take an old house like this, she could go up like kindling, you don’t know what