It seems the house has figured out that I have learned a thing or two about wiring – the kitchen ceiling fan gave up the ghost. I believe it was likely the motor because the light still worked. Because I recently learned the light kit is wired separately, I investigated to see if there was something wrong with the fan wiring. The wiring was fine – likely the motor was burned up. No matter how many time we flipped switches, pulled chains, assisted the fan blades by manually pushing them, or simply cursing the fan, it never worked.

Another trip to The Home Depot and a new fan was purchased and installed within an hour.

Doesn’t look bad…

A couple days ago, I wrote about the addition of a light kit to our ceiling fan in our living room, thus adding light to a room that we have avoided for 9 years because it was too dark. There was one other project hanging over our heads.

Five years ago, we remodeled our kitchen. We had a contractor break through the walls into the formal dining room and create one large kitchen. The room was demolished, including all of the drywall, flooring, and ceiling. We designed every inch of the room and made the kitchen that we wanted for all time.

When it was completed, we discovered that the light over the dining table was installed about 10 inches off center. Of course, this happened because the lightbox was installed before the ceiling was installed and there was no furniture in the room. It was a good attempt – but a horrible final product. Linda almost had the contractor move it at the time (which would have meant a lot more labor and a patched ceiling. Ultimately, we decided to leave it alone.

Leaving it alone just wasn’t good enough, however. Linda notes that she sees this off-set light every time she enters the room. To hear her tell about it, you’d think she’s embarrassed about the room because of this one thing. When asked, most people don’t even notice it until it’s pointed out to them.

However, Linda finally came up with a solution: Place a hook and swag it over. I didn’t think I’d like it, but it works quite well.

Since moving into our house in March of 2003, we have been living in relative darkness – in our living room, that is. The only installed lights in the room are three can lights over the fireplace at the far end of the room. We’ve added lamps, but they really didn’t do much to light the room, just give enough light from which one could read.

We’ve painted the walls lighter colors, which helped a bit. However, when we added on the sunroom to the back of the house, it covered the one large window of the living room – thus blocking out even more sunlight. The room was getting darker and we didn’t like it.

We discussed having an electrician install more can lights throughout the ceiling – that would surely get more light in the room. However, this was an obviously expensive option. We thought about painting all of the decorative wood paneling in the room white so that could brighten the room up; this was an unpopular option.

Finally, we wished out loud about how nice it would be if the ceiling fan in the middle of the ceiling had a light on it. We knew there were light kits out there, but neither of us are electricians. Linda decided it was worth my potential electrocution to see if we could do it ourselves.

All it took was a trip to The Home Depot, $25 and 10 minutes of my time and IT WORKS.

Here are pictures to show the difference. The first picture is the room fully lit to its full potential prior to the light kit being added.