I am sure you have a few questions already... what happened to August 2011? Why aren't you talking about the mud room... etc. ? We took August off from house work, we worked on the garden, went to some concerts, volunteered, celebrated my birthday and planned some September trips. We did manage to take a few hours out of the one of the weekends to install our 'new' outdoor porch light. I am putting 'new' in quotes because my parents bought this light for us as a house warming gift. That's right... when we moved in, in May 2010. It sat in our basement for over a year looking pretty and doing not much else.
There is multiple excuses of why it did not get installed, the biggest being we knew we were going to remodel the outside and did not want it to get damaged. The real reason is we put in the basement and then it kinda moved off our to-do list. But, we had no more excuses, the exterior had been done for two months and the bare light bulb was definitely lowering our curb appeal.
For those of you who are wondering, it is a pottery barn light, my parents got in on sale for memorial day, it is a beautiful moravian star light with speckled clear glass and an oil rub bronze finish. We pulled it out of the box, shortened the chain, and turned off the breaker. Project light was off and running 16 months in the making.
Josh quickly got the old bare bulb socket off the ceiling and we realized the new light base had a much smaller circumference. For the record, this has happened every time we have installed a new light... what gives? So, we had to sand the area down and then quickly apply two coats of yellow paint to the area. Two hours later we came back. The biggest issue we had was that the old wiring in the house is not color coded. It's hard to know which wire is the positive and which is the negative. Josh held the fixture and I hooked it up, and I took a shot in the dark. We ran a test (involving running down to the breaker and flipping the switch), which proved I had guessed wrong.... urgh! 50/50 never works for me. We uninstalled it and swapped the wires (since this time we have bought an electrical meter to avoid this).
The best part was when we flipped the light on... something amazing happened, the barrel vault in our front porch immediately reflected a lattice work of triangles from the star. It was pretty freaking amazing and a total unexpected win! I love this light. This is probably the cheapest and most satisfying house project ever. It look us about 4 hours (painting included) cost under $100 and transformed our entire porch. If I had known this I would have installed it ages ago.
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