Let There Be Light

March 31, 2008

Filed under Confession, Home

4 responses

Remember how I was whining about the poor lighting in my sewing space? Yeah, I solved that problem.

Today, I installed a new light fixture downstairs. It was fairly easy and only took about an hour. I started out by reading this tutorial at HGTV.com.  Very helpful. Did a little window shopping online to pick out the fixture I wanted and ran my idea past my dad, who is my sounding board for all things home improvement. After Miss L woke up this morning, we ran up to the store to pick up the new fixture and a few light bulbs.

The most challenging part was fitting the plate up to the screws jutting out of the junction box. Try as I might, I couldn’t get the holes to line up, largely because of the thick layer of insulation that shifted to obscure the screws. I’m a crafty girl so I tied ribbon to the screw heads then pulled the ribbon through the holes on the plate (using my handy dandy strap-turning tool). The ribbon was a great help in guiding the plate up to the proper position.  All in all, the whole thing took about an hour.

I was pretty proud of myself, so I called my parents to brag. My stepmother answered the phone and was duly impressed, in no small part because of my similarities to my father. Not only am I a big-time Daddy’s girl, I’m just like him. Same temperament, same sense of humor, same, same, same. (We do differ in a few things: I have no athletic prowess whatsoever; he has never breastfed a baby.)

Because of this family resemblance, I had a tiny bit of trepidation about this particular project. My father is more of a Tim “The Toolman” Taylor than a Bob Villa. He’s no longer allowed to do electrical work given his streak of  mishaps. One of my favorite stories involves my dad installing a ceiling fan in the bedroom that could only be turned on/off from the living room. (This happened more than 20 years ago but we still razz him about it.)

I was nice; I didn’t rub it in. Much.

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