Why emphasize this?

Two reasons:
 Other types of work can create hazards related to the electrical system.
 Even so, we're there for advice and specification; not installation or repair.

Safety rules in the electrical code address work on other systems, and we can review them together. This is important because some safety issues are overlooked very frequently, even by employees of professional contractors licensed in other trades. For more on this, see the page on
Safety Rules
Many such mistakes hide beneath anyone's notice, so long as an installation seems to be functioning right . . . until something bad happens.

Here's a nearly-horrible example;
This gas line—yes, that's today's inexpensive version of the old black iron gas pipe—could have exploded when it shorted to the building steel, taking down the house. That it didn't was sheer luck. More luck yet: they were home and managed to extinguish the fire before flames ruptured the corrugated stainless steel tubing (csst) to reach the gas.

How could this happen? John Thompson, who came upon this in late June, 2025, noted that a small, required electrical fitting and the associated wire had not been installed. They would have provided a better path for stray current. Especially if the slightly more expensive black-coated version of csst had been used rather than the cheaper yellow-coated stuff, there might have been no arc and no fire. Perhaps the plumber/pipefitter's employee who ran it was unaware of the bonding requirement for csst. ("Plumber" is guess; installer information for this gas line is not readily available. It might have been a handyperson or do-it-yourselfer, operating outside the law.)

Let's look at a less calamitous mistake.

If someone paints a wall and, perhaps without noticing, gets paint in a receptacle's slots, it's no longer as safe as it was designed to function. Usually the change is small, though receptacles such as the one below contain complicated mechanisms, and fouling them increases the level of risk.

The same is especially true of a panelboard, or a smoke alarm, equipment whose primary purpose is to ensure your safety; because that equipment is not hermeticaly sealed, paint spray can disrupt their mechanisms.
Your on-site consultation will include specifying which parts if any should be replaced—possibly an entire contaminated unit—and, if you want, an explanation of why there's no way to restore the affected parts to safe, legal function by scrubbing or scraping or using solvents. The most those approaches can accomplish is make the equipment look good; they don't fool the mechanisms.

You set the limits for each consultation. We'll discuss the concerns, the reasons to examine parts of your system; you decide if you want to leave any of it alone, and what you're okay with opening up to evaluate. Understand that paint, wood, masonry or plaster may need to be disturbed to investigate your wiring.

Consider this scenario:
A light's been flickering. You changed the light bulb, but that didn't improve anything, so you asked for a look specifically at that flickering issue as part of the overall evaluation your system. In such a case, often it makes sense to examine the switch and its wiring.

It turns out the switch cover and perhaps the switch itself were painted in place the last time the wall was spruced up. The paint now glues it together, as well as filling the slots in the cover screws. Despite knife-scoring the painted seams in preparation, a number of things might happen in the course of removing the cover plate:

• The cover may come right off, just as though it had not been painted; or
• it may be necessary to savage the screws; this could mean replacing them, which is trivial, or it could require something far more tetchy and time-consuming.
• Some of the paint next to the cover plate may peel; or
• The cover plate may break, being too well-glued to the swtich handle; or
• The switch may pull apart; or
• A chunk of the plaster or drywall next to the switch plate may come off with it.