Dining room lighting

One more lighting update, I replaced the dining room light fixture too, it was too modern for the style of the home.

Here's some more scary old home wiring... eek. The stuff is rather brittle. I thought this would be an easy one, just unscrew the old cross bar and put in the new one... too bad on of the holes was stripped.

It would be best to replace the box completely but I thought that if I did that I would have to run some new wiring as the insulation on the old probably wouldn't hold up. Instead I drilled out the hole then tack welded a nut onto the back so a screw will go in like it used to. I made sure I covered the ceiling and wires and we emptied the room of furniture before this part... I'm sure it's not a recommended technique.

 The results turned out great though. This is another of the lights that my wife found online that are about the same age as the home.

Living room light

So it's been some time since my last post. Unfortunatly not too much more has been done but we do have some new lights up. We took the ceiling fan down in the living room and found the bracket for the fan was held up with 6 drywall screws into the ceiling, luckily they much have hit some of the wood lathe behind the old plaster ceiling otherwise it likely would have come down some time ago. You can see two sets of three screw holes spaced out, this was how all that was holding the fan up before.

 I had to make a bigger opening to mount a pancake box against the joist to hold the light fixture. This way it has better support and will make it much easier to change out the fixture in the future, I made sure it was rated for fans too! There were 4 lag bolts that hold teh box to the joist for support.

I found an old Moore Handley Homecenter ad from the 60s or 70s in the ceiling too and a pieice of screen.

 Bought a new ladder too, the one on the right was kind of scary to work on.

 Then we used a ceiling medallion to cover the big mess I made, you can see the box in the middle of the medallion.

Tada!