See this big, ugly ceiling fan? It has been driving me crazy. As in, every time I enter the room that ceiling fan taunts me. It's as if it calls out to me. "Jaaassooon," it says, in a ghostly voice. "I am so big and ugly and yet you leave me hanging here. Mwah-ha-ha! I'm going to be here forever!" In fact, when I shot our
house tour for Huffington Post, I had to creatively shoot around the damn thing.
Now, I don't hate
all ceiling fans. I know that they can be very useful and, in some spaces, they can even be fairly unobtrusive. But not here. This ceiling fan is just too big for the space. Besides, we rarely use the fan itself and the light that it throws off is terrible. I've been thinking about replacing the fan with a new light fixture for ... oh, well, about a year now. After
successfully installing the light in the living room, I finally felt ready to tackle this project. As it turns out, it was actually quite easy. I didn't shock myself once! Want to see how I did it? I thought you might so I risked falling off the ladder to take photos as I went along. Read on for the step by step process ...
Before I even stepped foot on the ladder, I shut off the power to this room. Since the fan was already hanging here, I turned it on and then cut the power so that I could be certain that I had turned off the correct circuit.
The first step in taking the fan down was removing the blades. When I climbed up the ladder and saw these little brackets on the top of the blades, I was pretty I'd be able to remove them fairly easily. I was right. I slipped a flat head screwdriver under one of the clips and the blade popped right off. As you can see in this photo, the tops of the blades were covered in a layer of dust. Yuck! No wonder I don't want this thing hanging around!
With the blades and light removed, the fan looks like some sort of alien spaceship. The fan was much lighter and easier to work with once the blades and light were off.
There were three screws at the base of the fan, where it attaches to the ceiling mount. I loosened all three screws and then found that I had to remove one screw completely in order to slip the ring from the housing.
Now that the fan was hanging free from the housing, I was able to disconnect the wiring. This was a quick and easy step. I merely unscrewed the little caps and pulled the fan's wiring from the wiring that's stashed in the ceiling. And then I got a nice little surprise. Now that the fan was no longer attached to the wiring, the whole thing slipped out of the housing. I wasn't able to snap a photo (I was, after all, holding a ceiling fan in one hand) but there was a little ball on at the top of the fan that slipped right out of that little U-shaped part of the housing. Once the fan assembly was removed, it was just a matter of removing the screws that attached the housing to the light box.
And there we go! The fan is down and I'm left with wiring ... and a big circle of unpainted ceiling. D'oh! I was hoping to complete this project in one fell swoop but I had to press pause long enough to paint this part of the ceiling. I let the paint dry a little before I installed the new light.
After removing a ceiling fan, installing the new light seemed really easy. As you can see in this photo, I got impatient and started installing the new fixture before my paint patch had dried. I was losing light quickly and I wanted to at least get the new light wired. Once it was wired I was able to turn the electricity back on and get a sense of how the light would look.
Since darkness fell before I was able to complete the project, I waited until this morning to finish installation of the new fixture. I'll save you the boring details, but I did have to have to trim the light's cord to be able to hang it at the height that will work for this room.
And here it is! The new light is up and I think it looks pretty damned good. As you can see, the area that I patched with paint doesn't really match. Womp womp! I've been thinking about repainting this room white and this may be just the reason to go ahead and do it. The only thing holding me back is the prospect of trying paint around the custom plumbing pipe shelving. Since that shelving in screwing into the ceiling and floor, it's not going anywhere. Hopefully I'll be able to MacGyver a way to paint behind the shelving. Until then, I'll try not to obsess about the splotch of paint around the light.
I like how the black exterior of the new light fixture coordinates with the plumbing pipe shelving and black radiator. The gold interior of the lamp brings a touch of warmth to the ceiling - and it also gives off a very flattering glow. The angle of this photo makes the light look bigger than it actually is. I'll try to get better shots of the room when I finish another little project I have going on - framing some photos for a gallery wall.
In case you're wondering about the light itself, it's the
Hammered Dome Pendant Ceiling Light from J.C. Penney. I had such great success with the J.C. Penney wood frame light fixture for the living room that I circled back and picked this one up too. It was on clearance for $70 and I was able to score an additional 20% off. All told, the light cost $54.
Images: Jason Loper
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