Buying a house means inheriting whatever the last owner did to it — including the parts behind the drywall. Most of what we get called out to in the first year of ownership isn't dramatic; it's small stuff nobody was told about at closing. Here are five things worth knowing in your first few weeks, none of which require any tools.
1. Find the panel and learn what's on it
Before anything goes wrong, walk out to your breaker panel and open the door. You want to know three things: where it is, whether the labeling is accurate, and where the main disconnect is. Panel labels are wrong in most houses we open — someone finished a basement in 1998 and never relabeled anything.
Mapping it is a one-evening job with a helper and a lamp. Flip one breaker at a time, walk the house, and write down what actually died. Do it in pencil on a card taped inside the door. The day a bathroom outlet starts sparking, you'll be very glad you spent that evening.
2. Test your GFCI and AFCI protection
The outlets with the little TEST and RESET buttons — kitchen, bathrooms, garage, outdoors — are ground-fault devices, and they're mechanical. They wear out. Press TEST; the outlet should cut power with a click. Press RESET to bring it back. If pressing TEST does nothing, that outlet is no longer protecting anyone and needs replacing.
Do the same for the smoke and CO alarms while you're at it. If your new house has two-prong outlets in the bedrooms or no ground-fault protection near water, that's worth addressing early. Our GFCI outlet installation page covers where code requires them and what the work involves.
3. Know how much house you actually have, electrically
The number on your main breaker — usually 100, 150, or 200 amps — is the ceiling for everything you'll ever add. A 100-amp service was generous in 1975 and is tight today if you're thinking about an EV charger, a hot tub, a heat pump, or a shop out back.
You don't need to do anything about it on day one. You do want to know the number before you start planning, because "we'll need to upgrade the service first" is a much better thing to hear during budgeting than after the electrician is already on site.
4. Learn where the DIY line is
Plenty of electrical work is genuinely homeowner-friendly: swapping a light fixture, replacing a switch or outlet like-for-like with the breaker off, changing a thermostat. If that's within your comfort zone, go for it — with the power off and verified off with a tester, not just switched off at the panel.
What isn't: anything inside the panel, anything that adds a circuit, aluminum branch wiring, and anything you'd need a permit for. Those aren't about difficulty so much as consequence — a bad splice in a junction box you can't see again for twenty years is the sort of thing that shows up as a house fire.
5. Get a baseline while everything is still fine
Home inspections during a sale are broad by design. They flag obvious problems, not panel condition, grounding, circuit loading, or whether the previous owner's garage subpanel was permitted. If your house is older than about thirty years, or if the inspection report used the words "recommend further evaluation," it's worth having someone actually look.
An electrical safety inspection gives you a written list sorted by urgency. Most of the time it's reassuring. When it isn't, you find out on your schedule rather than during a January cold snap.
When to bring in a professional
Call the same day for burning smells, scorch marks around outlets, shocks from appliances, or a panel branded Federal Pacific, Zinsco, or Challenger. Everything else on this list is a scheduling conversation, not an emergency.
New to Flagstaff or Show Low and want a set of eyes on the place? Call us at (928) 563-6237 — we'll tell you what's worth doing and what's fine as-is.