Guest Bedroom Electrical

Since I already had the circuit breaker for the upstairs bedrooms turned off (they're both on the same circuit), I decided to do some electrical work in the guest bedroom, too.

The light switch in the guest bedroom hasn't worked since the first time we toured the house. Flip it on and off, on and off, nothing changes. I even tested every single outlet with the switch in both positions, and the switch had no effect.

Today I pulled the switch out of the wall to make sure it was wired up. It was. Next thing to do was check the outlets - every other room in the house has a switched outlet, this one should too. And as long as I was pulling out outlets, I might as well replace them with ones that looked decent. This wasn't even the worst one, just the first I thought to take a picture of (you'd think I would have that figured out by now):

Oh, yeah: Brianna reminds me that all these outlets have been scrubbed multiple times by this point.

Anyway, it turns out the switched outlet was the second outlet I tried. Someone had replaced the outlet and apparently not known you needed to break the tab between receptacles for a switched outlet (I didn't know that til I read up on switched outlets after we bought the house).

I installed a new outlet, broke the tab, and et voila:

The switch magically turns on the light! (and cleans up the painter's plastic and vacuums the floor - I need more switches like that).