Home Improvement Saturday

Every once in a while, I get the urge to do some DIY home improvement project. This happens every couple of months, and I hope in the end, my home looks better for the effort I've put in.

For our early Christmas, my mom gave us a Lowe's gift card. She intended for us to spend it on a new dishwasher, but we decided to wait until it died to replace it, so that left us with $100 to spend on something else.

Well, the lighting in our dining room has always bugged me, and the ceiling had some stains on it, so last weekend we went out and bought a couple of pendant lights to replace the canned lighting. The biggest problem with this is that we have 10 foot ceilings and the lights are recessed another 6 inches or so, so the room

was always really dimly lit. I was also fairly sure that the water damage had been caused by a shower malfunction a couple of years ago, and that there were no plumbing problems causing the staining, so fixing that up would be a good thing to check off of our to-do list.

Unfortunately, the day didn't go quite as planned. First, the breaker controls all lighting on the first floor, as well as the tv. This is a huge problem because Day has been anticipating the KU Jayhawks game all week. He even reminded me that it was on at 11 today on Wednesday, before we went to bed.

Not to be deterred, I thought, well, take out the recessed lights, at least to the point of electricity,

work on the ceiling repairs, and then I can finish up after the game.

So, we get Ethan put down for a nap, and I get going. The light fixtures have been plastered into the ceiling, so they have to be pried and yanked out, which takes nearly an hour. At the point

where I get them out, I realize that the hole is 6.5 inches, and not the 5.5 inches that our new fixture is, and that there is no electrical box to attach them to.

Ethan then wakes up two hours ahead of schedule, and we decide to go back to Lowe's to get the missing hardware, some sort of medallion to cover the 6.5 inches hole, and some sort of conversion kit to allow us to hang these.

Fast forward a few hours, and $43 dollars later, we are back home and I get back to work, with Day trying to keep Ethan out of the way.

I'd love to say that it was smooth sailing from there, but the

conversion kit was impossible to install, the wiring had to be cut super short to remove canned light, and then was hard to attach to the new fixture. In the end, we stopped for the day, and we'll try again tomorrow.

I turned on the breaker, and checked the light, and it does work. Now if only I could get it attached.