This all started about 6 years ago when my wife and I learned that we were expecting our first child. After procrastinating for as long as I could, we began the nesting process. Along with remodeling the bathroom, we also needed to set up a nursery for our incoming daughter.

This was a time of busy activity and anticipation. We picked out paint colors, bought a crib, and hung a decorative alphabet of hand crafted letters on the one wall. I also learned that my wife’s family has a tradition of having a rocking chair in the nursery to use for nursing and rocking the baby to sleep. We decided how we were going to arrange the furniture in our modest nursery and knew just where we wanted to put the rocking chair. My wife figured that the floor lamp would be positioned right next to the rocking chair in the corner opposite the door.

That’s when we discovered our problem.

According to building codes, every room in a house either needs to have an overhead light controlled by a switch near the door, or a power outlet that is controlled by a switch near the door. Our new nursery had a switch controlled outlet near the door, but the lamp that would be the main source of light for the room was going to be about 12 feet away from the door. Running an extension cord across the room wasn’t going to be a practical solution. The nursery was a second story room with no access to the wiring from underneath. I also wasn’t very enthused about the idea of crawling around in an attic that was full of blown insulation to fish new wires down to rewire our room. Plus, I knew we would probably want to rearrange the room again at some point in the future, so that would mean rewiring the room yet again.

There had to be a simpler way to get our hard-wired wall switch to control a different outlet.

They say that necessity is the mother of invention. In this particular instance, I can say my wife is the mother of invention.