Back to Real Man’s Work

Inspired by our new carpenter, I decided to finish something that had been bugging me for at least a year, maybe longer. There is a section of our house where we keep socks, jackets and hats, that is incredibly dark. There is a decorative light that is completely useless for illuminating things, compounding the fact that in many parts of the house, we could benefit from more light. Being the old man that I am, when I look for hats or socks, it’s so dark I can’t see a thing. It can be really frustrating.

I set out to replace the light with something brighter, maybe even spotlights, but found that the choice of wall mount lights (I forgot their name) is limited not in quantities, but in styles. There seems to be a countless number of variations on the same thing. Plus, I didn’t want anything too fancy, and of course, I was avoiding anything too expensive.

I finally decided on something from HD, and then the question became, when I put the thing in? Would it be another year? It’s been known to happen, but not this time. Within a week of purchasing the light, I decided to bear down and install it. It was pretty straightforward because I had explored this possibility in the past and as a consequence, the light was practically disassembled. I’m amazed it was still hanging from the wall.

All it took was replacing the wires and screwing the new light in. I had to replace the mounting bracket, and then I was confronted with a bit of conundrum. Since it’s a double light, there were two sets of colored wires - two white, and two black. Normally you attach white to white, and black to black. What do you do with two of each?

Feeling rather stupid and inept, but not wanting to mess around with electricity, I did what I always do, and called an expert: JH and his magic bag of tools. He told me to simply attach two whites from the light to the one white from the wall, and the same for the black, and voila, we had light.

Now it’s nice and bright in that section of the house, even when I put in lower energy 40W bulbs. I was thinking fluorescent, but we need light immediately and for a very short period. Fluorescent bulbs tend to take a few minutes to get bright, so I went incandescent. Plus, incandescent gives off much nicer light.

The best thing is the kids and R like the lights and find them aesthetically pleasing. I love when that happens.

Until the next time, thanks for reading.