Let there be light
Posted by K Sun, 10 Dec 2006 20:02:00 GMT
There’s nothing like having a party to finally motivate you to do something like hang the lamps that you have had around for the last three months but have been afraid to put up because electricity is scary.
But yeah, it finally happened. And I didn’t die even though it was a pain. I did learn something about electricity, though.
There are two lamps and once I went out and got an electrical tester and wire nuts (and borrowed a ladder), I shut off the power and dug the wires out of the ceiling. I had cut the ends off the lamps I was using (they had plugs on them) and figured out which of the two wires was the hot and which was the neutral wire (on lamp cord, the neutral wire has a couple of ridges running down it, whereas the hot wire is smooth). I split the wires on each lamp and stripped the last 3/4 inch or so.
I put up the crossbraces on the boxes and then unhooked some of the lamp chain and hung the lamps by the hook I’d made. I connected the ground wires to the crossbars with a screw, and connected the black hot wires in the boxes to the hot wire on the lamps. The neutral wires got connected to the white wires in the boxes. The lamp in front of the door had an extra black wire, and at first I connected the wrong one, something I found out when I went to check the wiring by turning the power on and neither light came on. I eventually determined that BOTH black wires needed to connect to the hot lamp wire, since one of the black wires ran to second hall lamp (at first I wasn’t sure if it had been wired with an extra wire for a ceiling fan, which didn’t make sense but wouldn’t have surprised me). This was after a lot of trips up and down the stairs turning the power on and off and getting the first light to come on and then finding that there was no power going to the second light, then wiring it all together to get things sorted. So I rewired the main light about twice before everything was happy, and realized that the circuit is chained from light to light.
I also had to remove the crossbars (once on the back lamp, about four times on the front lamp) while the lights were wired, which was a pain since Matt had to hold the lamps up while I messed with screws that wouldn’t fit and all kinds of things. The instructions weren’t super clear or I misunderstood them and I put some screws in incorrectly and failed to put in some others that were not attachable without removing the crossbar. Anyway, I had to remove and reattach the first crossbar several times before it worked because:
1. I had not put some screws in that needed to be screwed in top down, and had to remove the bar for that.
2. I put the screws in the wrong holes (there are many, and what you need depends on how things work out and what kind of setup you are dealing with) on the crossbar.
3. Once the screws got in, we realized that the box was set too high in the ceiling and we needed longer screws to reach the nuts to hold the ceiling plates on.
4. Once longer screws were found and inserted, they were too long (meaning the ceiling plate wouldn’t be flush) and they had to be shortened by unscrewing them a few times. Luckily, the first try at this was successful.
I also tried to fix the living room lamp that is broken, but it seems that the actual fixture is broken, so I have to get a new one to rewire and that is for round two of electrical stuff.
I also recently found the stools I have been dreaming of (I saw them in a magazine but didn’t know who made them, and then chanced across them on Craigslist for cheap), we put up some art, covered up the ugly window in the kitchen, and got a Christmas tree. Anyway, not-so-great pics of the lamps and the stools are over here.
