Nice can? I don’t know. I feel like there was a joke in there somewhere.
Anyway, the long-awaited mason jar chandelier. As my Mother’s Day present last weekend, Dan hung this sucker for me from the ceiling. He wired it into the existing electrical from the previous fixture, and then I threw the switch. And darned if the thing didn’t actually TURN ON.
Our house suffers from being rather dark, partly because of the trees all over in our yard that we love, and partly because I thought it was a great idea to paint the living room a dark grey that is really a lovely color but sucks every photon that hits it. (More on changing that up later.) So we were nearly blinded when we turned on the 256 watts of pure, clear, old school power. It’s changed the whole feel of the first floor, not just stylistically but functionally. You know how you never really notice something until it’s not there? Well, the absence of darkness is amazing.
About the chandelier: plans came from Kara Pasley Designs. The idea for the board comes from one of her commenters, whose fixture you can see here. I used a 1x4 and several layers of paint and scuffing to make it look somewhat distressed, though I didn’t go the whole nine yards on that. We still need to address the fixture cap (you might be able to see some wire nuts peeking out if you look closely), but otherwise, the hooks and eyes we used to hang it worked great. The jars are ones I had laying around, for the most part, though I did buy those little fat ones for $9.00. All told, we’re looking at approximately $50 and about 5 hours of work, on and off...which would have been more like 2 if I hadn’t had to rewire the sockets about 20 times due to me being d-u-m. It’s all a learning process, people...and boy do I learn a lot...
A couple more pictures:
Eventually, when the dining room table is cleared off from all the minutiae associated with the 14 projects I have running right now, I'll take a picture of the whole room. For now, I'm off to finish one of those and try to get closer to clean.
This looks great. How did you attach the board to the cap? Just screwed on? I can't tell from the photo.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Rebecca. Do you mean attaching the board to the ceiling cap? It's the lamp cord through the hole in the fixture cap, which is then screwed to the ceiling. (To tell the truth, there's so much cord that ours is just kinda propped up in there, which you can't see from the photo. You'd be better off using the PVC cap that Kara recommends in her tutorial.)
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