pretty lights, all in a row (sort of)

Though they don't appear very recess-ive, these are the ten recessed lights my handy-dandy handy man installed. Currently they have the wrong kind of bulbs and as you can see, are dangling out of the enclosures like some kind of trendy art installation. They're dangling because the enclosures somewhat stupidly (read: cheaply) don't include a bracket to hold the sockets. Apparently, the brackets are part of the trim rings which haven't arrived yet. I inspected trim rings at Home Depot yesterday; some appeared to have it, some didn't, so I'm crossing my fingers that the ones I ordered do, otherwise we shall have problems.

Hey, holy crap, there was a just a knock on the door. Look what just landed on my doorstep... trim rings!

I'm gonna go open them and see if they're gonna work. Wish me luck.

Thaaaat's more like it. The real-time experience of Mitch blog is riveting, no? BTW, those errant pencil marks are gonna get painted. One good thing about going with the cheapo 65-watt incandescent bulbs is that I now realize they're stunningly bright (the one above is dimmed down so it won't freak my camera out), so when I do finally spring for LED's, I don't have to get the super bright ones. The more affordable ones are literally about 1/3 the brightness of standard halogen incandescents, but there are enough fixtures that it shouldn't be an issue. As mentioned in an earlier entry, I had to order them from Home Depot's website because the stores don't stock the silver metal ones. Apparently the general public digs white, brown and probably tacky faux-wood grained hideousness. Semi-amusingly, these rings kind of look like silver-painted plastic, but are in fact brushed metal. If anyone accuses me of having plastic lights, back me up, ok?

back to our regularly scheduled programming...

While Handyman Keith was installing the lights yesterday, I was pulling down all the extraneous existing and sometimes inexplicable lighting seen below. Oh how I hateth a ceiling fan, and there's millions of them here. The good news is that, while a supreme pain in the ass to install, they're super easy to take down. And fortunately they didn't do too much damage (i.e. large holes) with the ring of six of fluorescent tube fixtures. (the smaller round holes are where the recessed lights went in. The huge round hole is actually an HVAC duct, so that'll just get a new regulator cover)

Since we eliminated numerous light switches (previously mentioned "Winchester Mystery House of Electrical" phenomena), I need to install smaller light switch wall boxes and fill in drywall accordingly, as well as filling in the holes left by now-adandoned ceiling lights. This is a blah, time-consuming activity, and surely one that isn't very interesting for you to read about, so it could be a little quiet for the next few days.