Month: September 2016

The master bedroom was the first major room to be redone and it’s taken much longer than expected.  But that’s ok because it was just done in small blocks of time and effort.  Yesterday, I ordered the bed frame – king size – and today, I ordered the new mattress – Purple.  This will hopefully be a great experience when it’s done.

In the meantime, I need to plan out the wardrobes for the master closet.  I initially thought it would be extremely easy, but the more I work at it, the more difficult it becomes.  It’s funny, you see the empty closet and you say “that’s a huge closet”, then when you try to plan out some wardrobe frames, there’s suddenly not enough room.

And, I want to get started with the next room, which will probably be the laundry.  The laundry was going to be first room, but a desire to have a fresh living environment (or just sleeping environment) took precedence.

The laundry room suffers the most from a failing ceiling light.  It’s been quite a while that the fluorescent ballast starting going bad and I wasn’t convinced to spend the money on a new one.  First, T12 lights are discontinued.  I didn’t want to start investing in T8 bulbs if I was going to redo everything as LED.  So, I just let it continue to flake out.  The light output is probably about 50% and flickers like mad.

In order to start that process, I needed to have a plan for a new light.  I remembered my mantra: “only quality.”  And I wanted to have unique pieces, things you couldn’t just go out and buy from Home Depot.  Well, after a lot of searching, I found a unique LED light, but it is available at Home Depot.  It’s the Pixi Flatlight Luminaire.

It’s only 1/2” thick.  It’s LED.  It’s square (actually 1’x4’ is the one I want). It’s not cheap.  Sounds perfect.  I can get it from Amazon in two days.

With the paint finally complete in the room, I was able to begin changing out the outlets and switches.  The very first thing I did was make a big mistake.  I disconnected the first 3-way switch without marking any wires.  The second thing I did was make another mistake by installing everything completely before testing.  That resulted in tearing everything apart and doing it all over again.  And in the case of the 3-way switch, over and over and over again.

Friday after work, I started with the light and fan switch, figuring I could get that done fairly quickly.  I ended up running out of daylight.  When I started, I just had the standard switches, one for the lights and one for the ceiling fan.

I fitted the frame and got the light switch installed, then installed the fan switch.  There was very little room left in the box because of 4 wire sets running through the box.  I really had to jam the fan control in.

The first result looked really good.

But unfortunately, it didn’t work.  So I had to take it all apart again.  Let me say, the snap-in feature of the Adorne switches is great going in, but if you have to undo it, that feature really works against you.

When I got the mounting plate back off the wall, I found one of my light switch wires had come detached.  Maybe that’s why it didn’t work?  Maybe it pulled out when I was yanking everything apart?  Hard to say.  But here’s an idea of what kind of a rats nest was behind the plate.

I reconnected the light switch and made sure to test it out before committing it back to the wall plate.  This time around, there seemed to be less space available.  Even less so when I got to the fan switch.  It was a pretty stupid amount of pressure to get them pressed in place.  But they locked in and are secure.  I shouldn’t ever have to take that back apart again.

That project was completed the morning after I started.  The previous night after I ran out of daylight, I figured I could do a couple of outlets, since they just involved a couple of wires.  All I needed was a small spotlight to work with.  The end result of those was pretty good.

The next morning I also installed the security system panel, and none too soon.  The system had been unplugged the entire time I was prepping and painting the bedroom, so the smoke detector had just started to beep out a low battery alarm.  The final result of the security panel, light switch and outlet is:

The rest of the room will be done shortly and then it’s time for decoration and furnishing.

This has been a really long time coming, but the ceiling fan finally got installed.  And along with that, the first Adorne pieces were installed as well.  There’s nothing exciting about a ceiling fan install.  The only thing that varied was exchanging the provided downrod with a longer, 12” downrod.  That was a piece of cake.

One small snag I ran into was the mounting of the ceiling bracket.  I guess the fan makers don’t include screws to mount the bracket to the ceiling box.  I grabbed a couple of screws I had left over from the light switch install and they weren’t the right size.  So I went to my recently-populated small parts cabinet and pulled the drawer of machine screws.  Turns out the screw size I needed was the same as the ones used by cabinet pulls.  However, all the screws were too long.  I’ve been there before and that’s not a problem anymore since I learned the trick when installing the cabinet pulls.  A couple quick cuts and I was back in business.

Anyway, this fan is not of a brand that you see everywhere, like Hunter and Hampton Bay.  It’s Ellington, by Craftmade.  I’ve installed a few fans by the formerly-mentioned brands and the difference between them and the Ellington is notable.  There seemed to be a lot more thought put into the Ellington.  It had a few redundant safety features that were nice to see.  I also noticed the pitch of the blades was more dramatic and as such, the fan moved a lot more air.  My research has told me that in order to power fan blades with a greater pitch, you need a more powerful motor, so there’s that, too.

Partially installed:

And completed:

The painted blades look just fine.  The control for the fan is a specialized Adorne fan control, which got installed with the ceiling light switch.

The details on the Adorne install will be in another post.