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On the subject of the push-button switches, I bought my house from my grandparents estate, so I've been around this house since the 1950's. One of the two push-button switches at the front door was unable to be pressed, and therefore, unused for about 40 years, until I took the switches out of the wall and cleaned them up. The broken one wasn't broken. Someone aparently tried to push both buttons at once, and jammed one. I took the switch apart, and reassembled it, and it works like new. Growing up around here, the broken switch just didnt work, and my grandad just pushed the wires up into the attic, and papered over the ceiling hole. So, there was never a ceiling light in the living room until I bought the place.
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I bought my house as-is, of course. I fully intended to rewire the house from the beginning.
One afternoon, I was sitting in a chair beside one of the original wall outlets. I knew the plug itself was very old... black and ceramic. The lamp that was plugged into it flickered a time or two and went out. I heard the outlet sizzle. I jumped up and ran to the fuse box, and pulled the plug fuses... all 4 of them. Went back to the outlet, and started to take the screw out that held the brass wallplate on... ZZZAAAAAPPPP!! I got hit with a nice 120V!! When I recovered, I looked in the fuse box and found pennies behind each plug fuse in the box!!! This explained all the space heaters running all the time, especially when my grandmother got more feeble, and never blowing a fuse!!
I remove the pennies once I had pulled the main fuses, and then checked to be sure the power was really off!!! I fixed the wall outlet, and never blew a plug fuse in the next year I used the original wiring. Like I said previously, most of the knob and tube was in good shape. The stuff coming up from the basement to the outlets was basically cooked and the insulation would flake off the wires if you touched it.
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