Lighting Up Our Life

Yesterday we did a completely unnecessary but never the less exciting improvement to our home. Sometimes it's nice to do a quick switch up while a bigger and at-a-stand-still project is going on (cough bathroom cough).

A while back, our friends Chris and Nicole bought a two pack of some standard light fixtures, they installed one and then had planned to donate the other one since they didn't have a place for it. We are apparently a charitable cause, because we received this free light fixture donation. Free. Most beautiful word in home improvement.

Installing light fixtures is so far one of the main used-to-frustrate-us-but-now-is-a-breeze projects. Sometimes when we're working on something and we both feel crazy and we're looking on Google for how to do it and we think we're so stupid, I remind us that the next time we do the project we'll already know and so every project is a learning opportunity. That has been the case with light fixtures, Philip's dad used to always get a phone call when we needed one hung, and now Philip does it quickly and efficiently. So proud!

Unfortunately we don't have a lot of photos of this switch, because Philip did it while I was making dinner and so I wasn't around to take photographic evidence. We did get a few photos for you though so you'll get the idea.

He was so speedy that I didn't even get a before picture.
But here are his not-attached-to-his-body arms, reaching up to take out the light bulb. 

Here's the original shade. If it suits your fancy, come pick it up at our garage sale this summer! 

At some point we'll do a real tutorial of how to do this light fixture switcharoo, but this one just isn't it. Handyman Philip was much too quick, I was just cooking up some chicken in the kitchen and kept running over to take pictures whenever it wasn't urgently needing attention.

Here is how it looks now!

Up close and personal. It's just a plain light fixture, similar to what we have
in our office except a little smaller. 

Just so you get where this light is located, to the right there is the front closet, straight ahead is the 3rd unused bedroom. 

This is the view from our bedroom, down the hall to the bathroom. 

We weren't totally sure where we wanted to put the light fixture when we first were gifted it, but it made sense for the hall because of the size and I like that it's semi-flush because otherwise there would definitely be some hitting of heads on the groggy walk to our bathroom...once it's done. Now we just need to get rid of the extra smoke alarm, paint, trim, popcorn ceiling, agh.

Anyone else mastering the light fixture upgrade? Got a free home improvement gift?