No pictures here today, folks, but I just want to relate to you a little story concerning the light in the guest bedroom. Traci's mom - Jeri - decided that the existing fixture was unable to stay in the house. I am not sure if this had something to do with the fact that it sort of looked like a lantern from the 1849 California Gold Rush, but I am wondering if that had something to do with it. So she was nice enough to go out and purchase for us a pair of half-dome lights that would roughly match the one in the kitchen. They were pretty standard fare, and there was one for the guest bedroom and one for the bedroom in the basement. Pretty nice, huh? Well, it ended with me texting the following to Traci while she was down in Rhinelander: "You know I love your ma but she is hereby required to come over and gaze admiringly at that light for a term of no less than 1 hour." Let's take a look at what happened.
It should have been a pretty straightforward and simple installation. It really should have. Hook the bracket up to the screw holes on the electrical box. Connect the black wires to the black wire, white to white, and bare ground wire to the green screw. Then drop the two hangy screws through the holes in the light fixtre, tighten it up and you are good to go. It did not go quite as planned.
First of all, I made a bit of a fatal mistake right off the bat. When I took the old fixture off, I saw that there were screw-style connectors covered in electrical tape that were used to install the existing fixture. That is how mine was going to look when it was done if all went as planned. I also noted that the electrical box was not flush with the ceiling, it was about five or six inches up into the ceiling, and it appeared that an access hole had been cut in both the present ceiling and the ceiling that was there before that one. Uh oh. This is where I made my fatal mistake that I was talking about. I cut the wires leading to the wiring nuts right above them, and when I removed all the isulation and whatnot I discovered that I had an extremely short wire coming out of the box. I could barely get to it to access it. In hindsight I should have unscrewed the wiring nuts, but I had no way to know. I was able to get in there enough to strip the wires but pretty soon the black one broke off in my hand - I had bended it one too many times.
That is where things really got tough. I couldn't access the black wire enough to do anything with it. Even once I was able to get a little bit of copper liberated from the insulation that surrounded it, I couldn't wedge the wire I needed to connect it too AND wire nut in the space provided. There wasn't enough wire sticking out through the electrical box to allow the wiring nut to grab. I didn't know what to do.
I actually had to take a break from this project several times to gather myself and to let me frustration and rage sort of settle down. In the end what I had to do was to fashion some short connectors from the wires in the box to get the length I needed to connect the fixture. So the end result is that there are four connections in the box then there should have only been two. Oh well, they all fit thanks to the extra space.
Speaking of all that extra space, I have to say that caused a little bit of a problem as well. First off, it made it hard to access the box and get the extra wiring and space that I could have used. Secondly, it necessitated a strang way of hooking up the whole thing. I had to use the extra long screws that had been used for the old fixture, and this is what I did: I screwed the screws into the appropriate holes on the electrical box, so the heads were dangling downward. Hanging from the heads I had the mounting bracket. This was per the instructions that came with the light. Hanging from the mounting bracket in the same manner were two more screws, with heads pointing down. The idea was that you slip the heads of this second set of screws through some holes in the light fixture, and then you tighten everything down and it is hunky dory.
This system probably works well when your fixture is mounted flush with the box which is mounted flush with the ceiling. I, however, did not have this luxury. My mounting bracket was dangling from the heads of two screws, and when I tried to get the shorter screws through the light fixture it just wasn't working. What was happening was that all my extra wiring was getting fouled up around the mounting bracket, pushing it upward into the void so that I couldn't get the screw heads through the fixture. It took a lot of perseverence and a ton of luck before I finally had both screws set in the fixture, and even then it was only because God had begun to pity me a little. Once I tightened them down it was all good and everything sat like it should have, but boy was it a process.
I was also scared to death when I went to flip the breaker on, but nothing happened. All the other lights and fixtures that were connected to that breaker seemed to work okay. Then I flipped the switch and I was honestly expecting to hear a ZAP! and see the entire house go dark. But it didn't. It seems to be working. Now woe is the poor guy who has to go up there and mess with it in the future (I know, it's going to be me), but for now it is working great. It really makes a lot more light in the room. And it even looks much better to boot.
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