Tales from the Dining Room

Ah yes, the dining room. The one room in our house that has zero furniture and zero decor. I promise we do own a dining room table and chairs but it’s currently been living either on our deck so we can eat outside when the nights are nice or in the garage awaiting a good sanding and either a stain or clear coat. The table and chairs are on the agenda for the next two weeks at which point they’ll live in the dining room until we build our new table many moons from now. The point of this post isn’t to ramble about how empty the space is though, I promise!

So why the heck am I talking about a room that has no furniture and other than a couple of coats of paint hasn’t been touched at all? This is why:

I understand why it was there, really I do – this room was technically a sitting room/sunroom (uhhhh shouldn’t it have more than one window, then?) which would absolutely call for a fan. It makes more sense to us though to use it as the dining room and this fan had to go. I guess for this particular space we just weren’t fan fans (har, har).

Then came the first dilemma: ain’t no way I was going to shell out over $100 for a light fixture. I wanted something large that would fill the space that also had some sort of interesting detail. I’m not really a chandelier person and everything I loved seemed to be some sort of oversized drum light. Unfortunately for me, these all came in around the $400 mark. Ha. Hahaha. Hahahahahahahaha. No. Nobody pays that much for a light in this house! Not no way, not no how.

One day, we were strolling through this wonderful kingdom of goods. It’s a magical place called Costco. Our mission was to buy chicken, beef, and coffee but then we took a hard right down a mystery aisle and there she was, shining in all of her glory. She was large and in charge and with a price tag of $80, I was sold.

We loaded her up and took her home alongside our meats and a cup of froyo.

Unfortunately for us, this was the most frustrating lighting change to date. Let’s run through the events day by day, shall we?

Day One: Find light. Buy light. Get home at 8pm. Cut the power. Remove the ceiling fan. Discover there is no electrical box in the ceiling to house the wires. Cap the wires. Turn power back on. Call it a night.

Day Two: Go to Home Depot to get electrical housing. Cut the power. Install the light. Turn the power back on. Admire light in all of its glory. Play a little game called “Which Switch is the Right Switch?” – This switch? No. This switch? No. This switch? No. This switch? No. Discover that light does not respond to any of the eleven switches that are in the kitchen/dining area. Unscrew bulb. Call it a night.

Day Three: Play with kitchen switches. Figure out that most of them work flood lights outside. Still leaves one mystery switch.

Isn’t home ownership fun?! Our new plan, whether temporary or permanent we don’t quite know yet, is to install a pull chain. Stay tuned for more adventures in lighting and a before and after showing off our new lovely lighting solution.