My husband and I are amazing together. In our 19 years we rarely disagreed on anything…even the important things like wedding plans, naming our child, etc. BUT…we’ve had a 10 year disagreement over the appropriate light fixture for our front hallway.
This is the classy fixture we’ve enjoyed since we moved in. The one burned-out bulb adds to the ambiance, don’t you think?
NOTE: our house is 170 years old and the hallway still has the original wiring from 1911. I had to leave the old fixture in place or risk the whole ceiling falling down on me! I did give it a paint job, though. When you own an old house the normal structural rules don’t seem to apply…you learn that the giant beam in the ceiling isn’t load-bearing but the light switch is!!!
I realize I have the tools to do this. I realize I have the template to do this. I realize I have the materials to do this. I realize I don’t think I could do this.
Worst part is that one of our cats was sitting under the ladder and started eating the crumbled insulation bits as they rained down on him. That particular cat is down to at least 6-1/2 lives at this point without added asbestos. Sigh.
Looks really pretty. I’m glad that you found a solution.
As a former owner of a 1927 bungalow, I know what you mean about old homes and finding strange things. I was once cutting through the plaster and lathe to put in wall speakers and found a wad of tape that turned out to be a hand twisted wire splice buried in the wall. Not safe and amazing that I just happened to cut into the wall at that spot.
I always hated the wiring in old houses. Really old ones still had the old bare wire on porcelain insulators (not used and dead but the apparatus was left in place).
What I DID like about old houses though, were the brass fixtures a lot of them still had on the ceilings. They always looked like heavy round or oblong shapes, until you removed the 15 or 20 layers of paint.
Scroll work and cupids. Always with the scroll work.
Even in places that got complete new wiring, I usually talked them into letting me clean up those old brass and re-installing them.
Never had anyone disappointed with doing that. They were beautiful and unlike anything gotten today.
Yours looks good up there above your acrylic project. If it was heavy and brass though. I will bet it was also covered in scroll work and not just a brass ring.
All this talk of “old houses” reminds me of a couple of Danish employees I had, back in my IT days. They scoffed at our idea of “old.” As one of them put it, “In Denmark, our roofs come with 300 year warranties!”
My sister owns a 1920’s house in a historic district and asked me to wire it for ethernet. UGH! Anyway the walls are metal-lathe with concrete with overlaid plaster. Sawzall is an amazing tool with the rescue blade. Anyway putting in 10,000’ of CAT-6 wiring was so painful (both figuratively and literally a lot of those wall cuts have my blood all over them). I put my son (around 8 at the time) up the laundry chute with a pull string to get the wiring to the 3rd floor (put in a conduit which he sheet metal screwed in on each floor. Still complains that I made him do it 10 years later. But the house which is a giant faraday cage has nice networking now. But found some truly amazing construction techniques in those walls.
