LIGHTING AT HARDY HOUSE

November 29, 2009
In one of the previous DOOR pictures you can see the front of Hardy House now sporting a porch light and an electrical outlet. Hardy House, to our knowledge, has never had a porch light. This excites us. :)

I have also included another picture here of the dining room that gives some idea as to other lighting we have in the house. In a previous blog I talked about the Nora lights. You can see some in this picture. They are the little white lights in the ceiling that light up the walls. We purchased museum quality bulbs at varying light spans. We also have one of these in the short hallway and in the stairwell.

The ceiling light in the dining room is another auction find. We had it over the dining room table before this remodel and we like it well enough to not spend the money now to change it. It has been reinstalled here (though the ceiling plate is not screwed down yet in this picture). We paid $25 for it at auction and Dave rewired it. I think that was three years ago. Works. great.

STAIR LIGHT, STAIR BRIGHT

November 27, 2009
One of the things Dave and I hoped to do throughout this project was to reuse, recycle, and repair whatever we could within reason. Sometimes we just couldn't do it because of cost but we gave it a try anyway.

Something that Dave and I enjoy doing together is going to auctions. I am a dealer in vintage linens, quilts, and some other antiques. My little booth is called Come-by-Chance Antiques and I maintain a booth at The Brick House Antique Center (see the link to the right). Dave is interested in antique farm implements, lanterns and tools, and we both seem to have an interest in architectural elements and lighting.

The hanging light you see in this picture came from The Brick House Antique Center. It was an old oil or kerosene lamp that, we believe, had been converted or modified at least once and maybe more. Dave rewired it. We had been looking for an interesting light to hang in our stairwell and we thought this would do the trick. The hardest part was that it really needed to be hung from a chain and the chain from a hook. We needed a ceiling fixture that could look appealing and have a hook on it. We looked around and couldn't find anything that would do what we needed. Dave and Jay, our electrician, tried to come up with some solutions and then the light bulb, so to speak, went off in Dave's brain.

In the back part of our home their was a ceiling fixture that we removed when we moved in. We simply left the cover plate over the hole. Aha! that cover plate was exactly what we needed, hook and all. The only problem with it was that it was shiny brass. Our light fixture was silver, or pewter. Off to Lowe's we went.

We found new wire that blended beautifully with the old silver color and we then purchased a can of silver paint by Rustoleum. The paint was awesome. Rustoleum makes a new spray paint that works on any surface. That's what I used and I sprayed the cover. It worked the nuts and matched the light fixture perfectly. I'll get another picture on here so you can see the finished product. We love the new/old fixture. What is old is new again, or so it is said.