We are renovating a house.  First off when you're in your 60's and the temps are in the 90's it's probably not the smartest thing to be doing.  Ripping up floors, clearing trees and brush.  hauling out rocks left by "gardener" and tearing down chimney.  

So yesterday I brought a fan from the shop to put in the room where I'm tearing out the floor.  Plugged it in but no joy.  Tried the other outlet in the room and nothing.  I took it to another room and plugged it in, nope.  Tried one last outlet and the fan started just fine. So I had a fan.  Not in the best place but it blew on me part of the time.

Today I went into the basement and found the fuse panel.  I assumed the previous resident didn't bother to replace any fuses, a reasonable assumption based on other facets of the residence.  I finally found one bad fuse and replaced it.

Took the fan and tried the socket.  Nope.  same for all the others.  Then put the fan back where I had it and nope it wouldn't work.  But in the meantime I had flipped a bunch of switches and thought maybe I'd found the reason the other sockets didn't work.  Then I tired one of the sockets that hadn't worked before flipping switches and now the fan turned on.  Took it out to the room and nope still wouldn't work.  
Then my wife said let's try something else.  So we plugged in a vacuum and it worked.  NOW, sure, NOW I look at the fan closer and discover a broken wire.  Move it one way and it connects.  The metal case of the fan was where it broke, with a little luck I could have touched the hot wire to the case and made my wife a little wealthier.  Luck was with me I guess.  However I still have a lot of work left to do and plenty of opportunity to keel over or something.