A few weeks ago we found our porch light in the Rejuvenation scratch-n-dent room. Over the years we’ve found many fixtures in there. It’s hit-or-miss, but this time we think we really lucked out!
Night shot
Day shot
No, I’m not talking about the excessive amount of coffee I may have drank this morning but rather about the fact that we now have working lights and outlets upstairs. It felt like I was on an assembly line by the time I screwed in the last outlet, but everything is all juiced up now. Except for most of the sconces, which I’m leaving until the end. I can easily see myself whacking one with a piece of trim, so it’s safer to wait. It is the most exciting feeling to walk up there and be able to flick a switch or be able to plug something in in any room. For the last 16 months, we’ve had to coordinate a maze of extension cords, all fed from single cord snaked up from the basement. And before that there was no power up there at all, a byproduct of our “let’s just gut the upstairs now, so we can save a bunch of time” decision we made back in 2004. I still have to say that was the right choice, because if we had moved even a single piece of furniture up there, this project would NEVER have gotten started. Yesterday I taught Chloe the most important lesson about working with electricity Click to continue »
By the time we we purchased our bungalow in 2004, it had been abused as a rental house for well over a decade. As you might expect, none of the original lighting remained (with the exception of the brass fitters in the living and dining room box beams.) Sadly, everything else was long gone, but don’t feel too sorry for us – we definitely had fun choosing new lighting!
We selected copper-foiled Tiffany-style stained glass shades from Rejuvenation for our living room sconces, box beam fixtures and dining room chandelier.
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In our kitchen, we used five Arts and Crafts style pendant fixtures from Progress Lighting. (To tie the fixtures together with the rest of the room, we installed matching carmel-swirled glass panels in the cabinets flanking our refrigerator.)
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For our ground floor bathroom, we chose sconces and overhead lighting from Schoolhouse Electric
In our front entry hall, we used another stained glass fixture from Rejuvenation which incorporated all of our paint colors from the entry hall, living room and dining room, which really helps tie the ground floor together.
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We ran electricity out to the patio and installed our old dining room chandelier. Low wattage flicker bulbs add to the ambience, as do our new Craigslist bargain table and chairs (only $100 for the set – woo hoo!)
I used a conduit bender (for the wiring) for the first time, and the thought it was a lot of fun. Earlier in the year his company remodeled his office, and he was able to salvage tons of old electrical conduit and boxes. That came in handy for all the practice he needed to get it right.
It was very encouraging to see these things go in. It makes you feel like there actually is light at the end of the tunnel.
Rewiring of the box beams and central fixture in the dining room. Two lessons were learned in this project:
1) Don’t take apart the box beams. When we did this for the living room, we came up with the much better method of drilling all the way up into the joist cavity and just feeding the wires through to the attic spaces upstairs.
2) Don’t permit work like this. This was the first time we ever got a building permit, and we came to regret it. The inspector was unhappy that the wires came through holes in the wood and did not terminate in a box. While I definitely believe that building codes are a good thing, there are times where the letter of the law conflicts with something that would still be safe. Obviously, very little in an old house would meet code, so any remodeling is an exercise in finding the right compromise between codes and aesthetics.
After a lot of effort, we were able to solve the problem by buying the smallest possible “pancake” boxes and painting them to match the beam stain. We were fortunate that the 3 1/2″ size was very close to the diameter of the fixtures bases, so they basically act as spacers between the fixture and the beam. If you didn’t know to look for them, you’d never notice them.
While gutting the main room upstairs, we unearthed this very strange light fixture. It had 24 little bulbs arranged in a rectangle. It had been plastered over at some point, so we never knew that it was there. And, needless to say given our other experiences in the house, it was still connected to live wires. Before this point, we had already given up on the houses’ wiring and had made the decision to rewire the whole thing. While it took a lot of time, rewiring was one of the best decisions we made during this project.
If anyone has ever seen a fixture like this or knows anything about it, we’d be interested in hearing from you. Thanks.
This is how our dining room looked when we bought the house. The intact, unstained woodwork was one of the main factors that drew us to this house. We had looked at so many houses that had painted or, even worse, missing woodwork. We really fell in love with the look of the flat-grained fir wainscotting and box beams. We later replaced the fixture with a more appropriate (Craftsman) one, and we moved this one out onto the back patio. We were not, however, very fond of the fact that all the windows had been removed from the room, cutting off any potential for airflow.
