Let There Be Light

You guys. YOU GUYS. I no longer have a desk lamp attached to my dining room ceiling. Now I have this baby instead:

 

For the moment I've reattached the giant ball on the bottom of it, but I'm not sure it's staying.  And as you can see, I need to paint the ceiling where the old fixture used to be.  And yes, that IS a garden hose and a spray bottle of moss killer in the corner of my dining room, thanks for noticin'!

View from kitchen:

Which I think is definitely an improvement over the view before the new chandelier:

As for the chandelier itself: do I love it? Meh. I don't know. But I think it will grow on me, and/or I'll do something to it that makes it look a little more special. I think part of the problem I'm having with it at present is that everything else in the dining room looks like shit. Let's talk about it.

PROBLEMS WITH THE DINING ROOM THAT WERE NOT SOLVED BY THE NEW CHANDELIER:

1. The chairs are still too light, and they're going to be that way until it gets warm enough to spraypaint them again. Also, I think I need to add a bit more reed-strapping to all the joints before I spray them again-- I'd like the joints to look a bit chunkier. I still really like the chairs, though. I wouldn't strictly MIND if two Chinese Chippendale armchairs appeared on craigslist tomorrow for around $50 or less each (I seem to be having a lot of luck with this approach, so I'm just putting it out there for the universe).

2. The walls are still bare. I can't seem to hang anything on them. Nothing looks right and it's making me crazy. I think I could solve this problem if I had room to put a skinny console table on the "long" wall, and then I could just pop a vase and a white ceramic animal onto it, center any number of big pieces of art over it, and call it a day-- but I really don't have enough space to do that. Poo.

3. I've never really liked the table-- it was very cheap (like, $125 with free shipping from amazon.com) and it happened to be the right size, and I'd gotten super tired of staring at a completely empty space so I bought it. I like the idea-- round but extendable with four legs instead of a pedestal-- but I really wanted something older and a little more Danish-looking. Add that to the list of Stuff I Want Craigslist To Provide For Me ASAP. Anyway, I don't know why I don't love it considering it ticks all the boxes on my checklist, but it's probably because I prefer old furniture to cheap amazon.com furniture. Think about it-- have you ever seen an amazon.com table in a House Beautiful feature? Nope, didn't think so.

4. I have no idea what to put on the table. Yes, an awesome vase with a gorgeous fresh flower arrangement would be perfect! Alas, I am too cheap to buy fresh flowers, and I'm also not a florist. I have no idea how to make flower arrangements.  Our nice neighbor dropped off the daffodils that are currently in my great-grandmother's silver pitcher, by the way.

5. Those $9 IKEA Vivan curtains would be awesome as sheers, but they're totally underwhelming on their own. Unfortunately I have like forty-seven crazy rugs and a kilim ottoman and a funk-ass brown couch and a beat-down yellow corduroy chair to contend with, and I don't know what kind of curtains could possibly complete the picture. Especially since I will someday get a new sofa, either ditch or reupholster the chair, and maybe swap out all these rugs for something slightly less insane.

6. Yeah, the dining room rug. Hatehatehatehatehate it in here. This looks like the home of a stodgy 80-year-old grandma. Ugh.

But really, I'm happy about the chandelier. I can't help but think we're going to have to do something to make it look a bit more contemporary, but for the moment I'm just glad it's not the weird spot-lighty thing. And I'm glad we hired an electrician, because as we'd feared, the wiring in this place is JACKED. UP. There were three transformers hidden inside that old fixture. Yes. Transformers. Not the Optimus Prime kind, which would have been cool, but the converting-volts-into-other-volts kind, which are decidedly uncool.

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PART II. [Refill wine before proceeding]

You know what is genuinely awesome in a completely unqualified way? My new bathroom sconces:

Ooh, weird distorted view of my kelly-green sweater and blue plastic shower surround (ugh) in the backplate! 

And a wider view (crap iPhone photo):

 

Better pictures to come after I paint the wall where the old sconces were, and when there's some natural light-- obvious problem here is that I can't turn on the bathroom lights, because then I'd be taking a picture of the only light source in the room and you wouldn't see the sconces, only the light.  

Anyhow, remember these babies (please enjoy this seven-month-old photo of the bathroom in its completely unrenovated state, which is the only photo I could find in which the bathroom lights weren't turned on, rendering them impossible to see)?

Ugh, I can't BELIEVE the bathroom used to look like that.  

Those dudes not only hideous, but they also contained the only electrical outlets in the entire bathroom. Yes, that's right-- there was an outlet built into the base of each monstrously ugly "sconce" (scare quotes because these things were actually designed to hang horizontally OVER the mirror, not vertically on either side of it).

Our electrician (who we really liked and who charged us a VERY reasonable fee for rewiring our bathroom, adding a circuit to our breaker, fixing the dead switch in the guest room, and helping us hang and swag the chandelier) gave us a nice new GFCI outlet that is independent of the switch that controls the lights, so now we can plug in a nightlight and we won't have to turn on the lights when we get up to pee in the night. Yay! (TMI?)

I picked these sconces for a whole bunch of reasons, the first being that they have very narrow backplates so they'd fit on either side of the mirror without requiring that we move the junction boxes up or out. Most sconces have a 5" diameter backplate, and we needed one no wider than 4.5". These fit the bill.

Second, they're period-appropriate-- the ruffled, half-frosted glass shades are so 40's. Also, they're chrome, which is weirdly hard to find-- everything seems to be brushed nickel these days. Not in MY bathroom, uh-uh.

Third, they were dirt-cheap at $12 per. Yup.