...In a different light

Other than our newly-built dining table featured in yesterday's post, did you happen to notice anything else different in the "French room?" No? Really??? You don't have our entire house memorized by now??? For shame.

In case you didn't notice, that little chandelier hanging over the table is another new addition!

It's the KRISTALLER Chandelier from (where else?) IKEA. It's so pretty and gives just the slightest little glisten without being too over the top. And it fits much better with our decor than what was previously there:

You can't see it in full from the above photo, but that's a big, ol' dark, honkin' ceiling fan/lamp.

It's actually a pretty dang nice ceiling fan. It's sturdy, has a fancy little slow dimmer when you turn it on and is remote-controlled. But.... it just wasn't working for us. So, it was time for an upgrade.

First thing's first: Whenever you are working with electrical things wired in the house, play it safe and shut off the electrical power to the room you're working in. You can do this from the main circuit breaker in your house. I'm glad Eric is smart and thinks of things five steps ahead, because if I were in charge of this job, I probably would've electrocuted myself about 15 times.

After the power was cut off, it was time to disassemble the ceiling fan. Eric got quite the shoulder workout unscrewing each blade from the lamp. And, I mean, my job of standing there to collect all the screws and pieces was no piece of cake, either (correction: yes it was). 

This is Eric's "Stop Fiddling with the Camera and Get Back to Work" face. Therefore, most of the following steps have gone undocumented.

After the fan was taken down, we were left with a hole in our ceiling and wires dangling down that looked something like this:

Source

Of course, those are not our actual wires, because I was very busy being super diligent and helping on the project...

Things paused for a while as Google was consulted Eric searched his mind to magically know how to rewire a ceiling light fixture. Once all of the steps appeared on the screen were remembered without having to look them up at all, Eric wired our new chandelier to the existing electrical wires. He ran to the basement to turn the power back on, and when the light popped on on the first try, I shouted down that we had done it! We had created light! I felt just like Thomas Alva Edison.

Once we discovered the rewiring was going to work, we shut the power back off and began installing the new chandelier. But before we attached that to the ceiling, we added a little decorative touch:

A ceiling medallion! I love the look of ceiling lamps hanging down from a beautifully-intricate ceiling medallion. I'd been searching online for one I liked, and almost bought this one from Home Depot for nearly $50. It was a good thing I put off purchasing it, because literally one week after searching online, we stumbled across the ceiling medallion above at a garage sale a couple blocks from our house being sold for a total of ONE AMERICAN DOLLAR. It just goes to show you what amazing things you can find for incredibly cheap if you just hold off and look hard enough. 

So, before attaching the chandelier to the ceiling, we first screwed the ceiling medallion to the ceiling. The rest was cake! We just screwed in the chandelier base to the ceiling in the center of the medallion and, voila! We were in business!

Now, I've just got to figure out how to neatly hide the excess wire cord that hangs down, winding through the metal chain - it's not very pretty right now, but I'll figure out a way!

So, now that we've changed the lighting and added a table, why don't we check out our French room's progression since we first saw it.

This is how it looked when lived in by the previous owners.

And here it is (as viewed from the living room) while we were working on painting it gray.

Here we have it before the inception of the dining table and addition of the chandelier.

And (incredibly blurry photos of ) the finished result. I promise I'll work on getting a better photo sometime soon.... You know, ones where my hand isn't shaking a mile a minute, and ones that Mr. Pancakes doesn't photobomb....

Of course, a room is never truly ever finished. We've got other ideas of additions to make, but for now, we're pleased. Just need to get to work on purchasing those dining chairs.....