Enlightenment

These are the fixtures we bought at Ikea a couple weeks ago. Installing them was a bigger project than Sami expected, but we enjoyed it for the most part.

First we had to take down the ugly old fixture. It was a big frosted glass and gold colored hershey kiss shaped thing located where the left fixture now hangs.

Then we had to figure out where the projector should be mounted in order to be the desired size and cut another hole in the ceiling for the second fixture. Of course the joists were running the wrong direction so we had to get an extra long 1/2" spade bit to drill through them and fish the new wire through. This would have been easy if we could have crawled into the attic and worked on it, but this is the basement and the bedrooms are right above.

So, we got the wires all hooked up and realized the hole where the old light had been installed was bigger than the round part on the new fixture. I did a bit of taping and mudding and it looked a bit better. Sami went looking for the paint and discovered even though there are 15 cans of paint in our garage, none of them were the flat white for the ceiling. He went out for groceries and got some paint too. It's not a perfect match, but very close.

Sami hooked up the light fixtures and we moved the arms around and fixed them in place using drywall anchors. We'll still have to adjust the lamps later when we have everything set up in the room. The next step is to buy a dimmer and install it.