Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Lighting Upgrade - Bathroom

Bonus tip, always remember to stop your drain so you don't
lose your screws and such down the drain.
Yesterday we showed you all of the glorious light fixtures we had illuminating our home when we purchased it.  Today, we have our first light replacement project and it begins in the bathroom.  Over the weekend, we had heard of a huge sale taking place at the Lights Unlimited store so we shimmied on over early Saturday morning for their "yard sale" and incredible prices.  We arrived before the sale was supposed to begin but there were already people there gobbling up all of the awesome light deals.  We did happen to snag a light fixture for our bathroom - a mere $10, originally $135 or something crazy like that (I wonder if they just put random high prices on those things so you think you are getting an out of this world deal) either way, we got a great deal.  We also found outdoor lighting that we will be pulling out when the right time comes (get the house painted first).  So when King Silas went down for his nap we Justin got to work on replacing that light.  I was there for moral support, I guess.

The first thing we did was to determine which fuse belonged to the bathroom so we could get the electricity turned off while Justin worked.  This was actually more time consuming than originally thought, it took us going through the fuses 3 times before we figured out which one it was - partly because we had unscrewed all of the bulbs in the bathroom first and had no light to go by.   Hey, we are rookie remodelers remember?  We did eventually find it and got the electricity off.

This is a nice picture of the collection of dust on our old fixture.
Next, Justin got to work removing the old light fixture.  This was simple enough - just unscrewing the fixture base and straps and disconnecting the electrical wires.

This is our old light fixture but you can see the different colored wires here.
Then he began installing the new light fixture by matching up the colored electrical wires and connecting them together.  You first begin with the white wires (they are the neutral wires), then the black wires (the hot wires) and finally the copper (the grounding wires).  The wirenuts are then put on to hold them in place.

This is Justin working on the ground wire - you can see from comparing to the picture above the difference in fixture straps - the new one has an extra swivel strap for adjustment.
The fixture strap is the next piece that is screwed into the wall.  Since our lighting is fairly old we did have a different type of fixture strap that we removed than what we installed.  Basically our old one had one single strap and the new one had two, with one being able to swivel to adjust to the appropriate level.  Justin adjusted the strap accordingly and screwed it into the wall.  This will give you a level light fixture.

The last piece to install was the actual light fixture base, which was simply screwed into place.

After everything was installed we popped in some light bulbs, turned the electrical fuse back on and enjoyed our $10 light upgrade.

This project was actually pretty easy to do and I am liking the added elegance this new light has added to our bathroom.  It has really stepped up the class in there.  I guess I should add that before we moved into our house we had a licensed electrician go through our entire house and address any issues we had - so we knew going into this project that everything was properly wired and functional before starting.  Now that we have this new light we are feeling pretty fancy and we will be on the hunt for more lighting updates in the future.

So here is the before and after on our little diy light fixture upgrade project:




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8 comments:

  1. I am very impressed! Very pretty fixture and WOW $10.00.

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  2. Justin did a great job. They really had some great deals at their yard sale, I wish we could have found more.

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  3. I love remodeling...of course by that I mean finding the ideas and begging my hubs to do all the work!:) Love the new light!

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  4. Thank you! I will admit that my husband does a lot of hard work around here too!

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  5. Remodeling - what an adventure. I've done more than my share - my darling husband liked to refer to this as "remuddeling".

    I'm following you. I'll respond on your etsy thread about being featured.

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  6. Thanks for the follow and I look forward to hearing from you!

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  7. I found you on Pinterest and went a little crazy looking through all of your upgrades, we just bought a house a couple months ago and also have our 'to do list' as we get the money. We have the same light fixture in our bathrooms now, I was wondering about the electrical outlet that is in the actual light fixture. What did you have to do with those wires? We are planning (eventually) on getting other outlets installed but for now that is our only one, so I am hestitant on replacing the light fixture beforehand.

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    1. Hey Brandi! Thanks so much for stopping by my blog! So even though it looks like there is a plug in that original light there actually was not one. We were fortunate enough to have the same amount of wires to reconnect the new light. I'm so sorry I am of no help! I will tell you though that before we did any electrical type work on our house we had an electrician come and check everything out for us. He fixed several issues our old house had and replaced some of our old outlets to get everything to code. It was actually a fairly inexpensive thing to have done and gave us a good overall feeling when it came to the condition of our house. It was no more than $100 - but worth every penny. Congratulations on buying your new house! We have had a blast slowly updating and changing ours (when the budget permits!) Take Care!!

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