My husband and I decided to put up a ceiling fan in our bedroom 2 years ago. I know right? Who puts them up? Well, my husband is always hot at night (good thing usually but not when he's a furnace and I can't go to sleep). To fix the dilemma we decided to put in a ceiling fan. At the time, a good idea. Not in reality. After an entire day of installation, it wobbled horribly. You see, our joists run the opposite way the box needed to go and there is no floor in the attic above our bedroom so with my husband knee deep in insulation we just couldn't get our junction box stable because, yup, you guessed it, it wasn't anywhere near a joist. Go figure!
We ended up installing a ceiling fan brace but the brace didn't quite brace and we just left it in and finished the installation. Well, with a not so stable brace the entire fan wobbled if you turned it on past the lowest setting. Because of this little snafu, we never used it. I hated it! It was ugly and didn't work well and just caught dust.
I had purchased a lovely little light at IKEA shortly after we purchased our house almost 5 years ago. It sat in it's cute little IKEA box and it sat in our closet until this past week. I put our beautiful
KNAPPA light together and realized it was a plug in light. Well, duh! That wasn't going to work.
I brainstormed with my DIY partner in crime (my brother) and we came up with the idea of purchasing a mini-pendant light from Lowe's and just using the Knappa shade. By the way, he thought the light was UGLY and so did my husband. Whatev... I'm in love so there.
I then saw one of my favorite blogs
Young House Love where they put an IKEA light up with a medallion above it to beef it up. Well, I thought that looked great! With the mini pendant light the base is a small circle and doesn't even stand up that high. so I thought, why not?
We took the ceiling fan down which is where the injuries begin. My husband gets roped into doing all these projects with me so we got all of the fan down but the bar that screws into the electrical box. The screw was stripped so I thought I'd fix it by rotating the bar around until it loosened the screw. It worked and the screw came out but so did some skin on my right hand middle finger. After some peroxide, a band-aid and a little break we finished taking the fan down.
This is where it happened. I was standing on the edge of our bed, looked at my husband, told him I'd better step back onto the step stool because I thought I might fall. Well, being the psychic that I am, I stepped on the right side of the step stool and began to move my left leg as the entire step stool tilted and I landed on top of a shut step stool on the ground.
The arch of my right foot and my right bicep/shoulder took the brunt of the fall and let me tell you it took a ton of weight with it as well. My shoulder hurts still today (this was Saturday afternoon) and my foot finally feels better. I have two huge bruises on my left leg but my light is up!
You can see the brass looking bar against the ceiling. That's the nasty thing that cut up my finger.
Here is my light with the Lowe's pendant already installed and our lovely ceiling medallion ($27 from Lowe's)
Here is Eryn who saw me taking pictures of our little project and said "take my picture. cheese". Oh by the way, our bed is all torn up because at this point insulation was still falling from the ceiling and we didn't want it all over our down comforter. So we took it off and then took this pink blanket and dumped it in the wash (which was a wedding present to my parents) Yes, to my parents. The blanket is 31 years old.
My lovely light as it was finished and again that night. The light is not really crooked I just am too short to shoot the ceiling that close. I think I was leaning myself. :o)
We still want to do the feature wall of molding behind the light so that will add to the ambiance. My husband so lovingly says as long as I am happy he doesn't care. What a smart man!
