A New Light Fixture for the Dining Room

First of all, Happy New Year everyone! Here's hoping everyone had safe and happy holidays. I have to admit, I didn't even stay up last night.....probably something to do with my date being on the other side of the globe....

Anyway, I went to SC to be with my family at Christmas and stopped in Atlanta to see my brother in law. Kind and patient soul that he is, he actually walked through IKEA with me, and I came home with this.

Now, my husband and I installed the light fixture in our bathroom, but I had never done this by myself....safety in numbers I suppose. Anyhow, since the hubs is off defending the country, I thought I'd give this a go on my own.

To give you an idea of what I was replacing, here is the "boob light" that was there when we moved in.

Just a basic ceiling fixture....but I wanted something with a little more pizazz to go over the dining table. I've actually been looking for months and despairing at how much it was going to cost me to purchase a cool light (everything I saw that I actually liked was over $100....some I saw were upwards of $400!!). While I was home for Christmas, my sister and I were pouring over the IKEA catalog app on my iPad and low and behold, was the Maskros light for a mere $39.99. I almost danced with joy.

Once I made it back home to Nashville, I asked some friends if I could borrow their ladder and got down to it. Like I mentioned before, my husband and I had changed a light fixture before, so I knew it wasn't hard.

First, let me stress safety.....I made sure the power to the fixture was off. Since my breaker box is not labeled well, that meant shutting off the power to the entire house. Better safe than sorry right?

I got the boob light detached from the ceiling. At first glance, there wasn't really anything unusual. This is what it looked like...

Now, to give you some orientation, this is a two bulb fixture, with a white and a black wire coming from each bulb. Those four are consolidated to one white and one black wire, which is what is actually wired to the ceiling. The only weird thing is that instead of grounding the fixture, whoever installed this took the grounding wire (the copper one coming from the middle of the fixture) and just wrapped it around the white and black wires. Weird.

And speaking of weird, when I looked up into the wire box, here's what I saw.

It's kinda hard to make out (keep in mind I was balancing on a ladder while doing this), but there is a second set of black and white wires in the wire box that have been capped. Being the careful girl that I am (and really, REALLY not wanting to burn down the house), I called my dad. He told me those extra wires were probably from a second light switch that probably used to be in the room, that was somewhere along the way removed. Seems plausible to me, and meant that I really just had to leave those extra wires right where they were, so I got the old fixture un-wired, and the new one wired in, simply matching white with white and black with black, then attaching the ground wire to the screw-to-nowhere in the wire box. Screw that puppy into the ceiling, turn the power back on, give myself a high five and then all I had to do was attach the million and two wire thingys that stick out from the center.

That was about halfway through (boy do I need to get a tripod for my camera...sorry about the blurriness!).  Once I got the rest of the wire things attached, then it was time for the billion and two paper star-flower-thingies. Those just snap on to the ends of the wires. It's not hard, but there are a TON of them! Anyway, here's the finished product.

 

Pretty cool right? I'll try to get some better pictures after I get my dining room put together so you can see the full effect, but I love how it makes cool patterns on the ceiling!

Painting a Thrift Store Find

I have a seriously embarrassing lack of seating in my house. One of the things about moving from a 900 sq ft apartment to a 1450 sq ft house....you can't fit many chairs in 900 sq ft, but it starts to get embarrassing when I try to have people over now. I shuffle chairs from the dining room to my music room so I and my cello students can have a place to sit. I thought about it the other day....I only had 5 dining-ish chairs. I'm not really sure how I ended up with that odd number, but I decided to remedy the situation.

There is a thrift store not far from the house called Southern Thrift that I've taken to wandering through every so often. Sometimes I don't find anything, sometimes I find something really cool....like this guy.

Now, I know it looks a little worse for wear in this picture, but I figured that for $3 (thanks to the fact that Southern Thrift gives 50% off all furniture every Monday), I could scrape off the K-Swiss sticker, sand it down and give it a fresh coat of paint.

I chose a basic glossy white. The other chairs in the dining room are stained wood, but they were significantly darker stained wood with upholstery (and don't match), and I liked the idea of a little variance. The other thing I chose to do was use spray paint with primer already in it. I'm all about saving work where I can. Some people call it lazy....I like to call it efficient.

I dragged the chair outside, sanded it down and then wiped it down with a damp rag. Once it was dry, I started spraying in thin and even coats (to avoid drips). Here's a picture after the first coat.

It took two full coats, plus a few touch ups. I let it cure for a few days in the garage before bringing it into the house to let the paint harden and to give the paint stink a chance to dissipate. Here's the finished product.

I like the contrast of the white with the darker wood tones and the aqua color on the walls. Have you been painting furniture lately? Tackling other projects? I'd love to hear about them!

Just Call Me DaVinci, Part I

Actually, don't....I'm really a terrible visual artist. I can't even draw stick figures without them looking deformed. However, I have been painting....a lot.

I started in the dining room. This room has a large glass sliding door that looks out into the back yard, and my original thought was to paint it some shade of sage-ish green to make it feel sort of like a garden room. I grabbed a bunch of paint chips, taped them to the wall so I could see them in the varied lighting throughout the day, and began narrowing things down.

Once I got things narrowed to about five different chips, I called in the hubby (mostly to make sure he didn't hate any of the ones I was liking...it definitely helps narrow things down!). Wonder of wonders, he actually zoomed right in on a color and said "I like this one." So that's the color I went with. I was surprised he picked the one color that was actually aqua instead of green (it's called "Aqua Smoke"...by Behr if anyone is interested).

By the way, here's what the dining room looked like before I started painting.

 

First of all, that's a lot of knotty pine!! Second, it was really bothering me that all of the wood (floors, walls, built ins) were all the exact same color! It made the room feel a little on the bland (and orange-ish) side...

So I got to painting. Let me just say, even with the help of some friends, this project took a looooong time! The grooves between the panels are actually quite ornate, which meant they all had to be done by hand, with a tiny triangle-shaped brush. It took two coats, plus touch ups to get those grooves done. Here's a closeup shot of the grooves (after paint...call it a teaser), just so you can see the level of detail.

 Fortunately, the flat parts could be done with a roller.

After nearly a month of work (a few hours here and there....not constant work!) This room is finally done! At least with the painting haha. Here are the after pictures....

I really love the amount of natural light this room gets, and you can actually tell now! Before, I felt like I needed to turn the light on every time I walked into the room...even in the middle of the day. Now it's fresh and bright.

There are a few more things I need to do before I can really consider this room "done". You can see some boxes in the picture above...I have nowhere to put my pretty china! Boo! I need to invest in a china cabinet. I also need to find some more dining room chairs as I currently only have five (and two of them are currently in the music room). I'd really like to put a great chandelier in this room....I think it would be gorgeous. I also need to hang some art on the walls and maybe add a side table or something. This is a large room, and it's currently pretty empty!

So this is my first painting project in the house....next up, the bathroom!