The improvement that the stenciling and door hardware made was huge, but it just made this ugly old-fashioned light stick out all the more.
I spent an inordinate amount of time looking for the right fixture to replace it with. I knew I wanted it to be modern and to go with the new oil-rubbed bronze hardware, so maybe kind of industrial-looking. But because of its placement, it also had to fit in with the dining area and kitchen lights; if you're looking in that direction from the living room, you can see all three lights at once, so they have to relate to each other in some way. (I wish I had a picture of it before with the old light so you could see what I'm talking about, but alas I don't.)
I finally found one that fit the bill - modern, angular, and with enough wattage to make the hall a little brighter. It's an area without any natural light, so it was a priority for me to find something that 1) wasn't frosted, 2) had more bulbs than the two that were in my old light, and 3) was a little airier than the old one, meaning a bit more negative space. After several months of searching, I found one on Joss & Main that was just right, and most importantly, on sale:
Pat Smith is my usual go-to in all matters electrical, so I called him up when it was time to do the actual replacing. He came over one afternoon and we both thought we'd be done in an hour or so...oh, how nice it would have been for that to be the case. After we started digging into it, several issues reared their ugly heads. The biggest one was the electrical box, which is the thing in the ceiling that the wires are situated in. As we were trying to secure the fixture to the electrical box, it just wasn't solid, and the more Pat futzed with it, the more janky it got, to the point where it just broke off in his hands. Here's a picture of the sad little thing:
See that part on the right? That's where a pretty big bolt was supposed to go to hold the light fixture in place. Yeah...it's not so much there anymore....that kind of won't work. We discussed some options, but in the end, we decided that our next best bet was to just replace the electrical box. Pat came over again the next day with his adorbs son Asher, who I got to babysit while Pat played around with the wires.
Actually, now that I think of it, Asher got to play around with wires too - no worries, Mother Megan, nothing live :)
In the meantime, this is what the hallway looked like:
I won't bore you with the details, but it took Pat and I another couple of visits for everything to get squared away. So it ended up being about 4 hours, plus one trip to Menard's in total - WAY more than we thought it would be. Pat was a good sport, but we were both kind of sick of it by the time it finally got done. But, luckily, the finished product looked pretty cool. Here it is in the daytime when it's not getting so much natural light in the area:
And here it is at night:
It's hard to picture since I don't have a "before" picture of the old light when it was on, but this fixture gives off a lot more light, which is very welcome. And I think it fits nicely with the dining area light, which you can see here (also with the ugly kitchen light) in the daytime:
And then here at nighttime:
With that, the hallway is complete! At least for now - the only other change that I might consider making in the future is replacing the tile in the bathroom...but that will wait for another day.
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