The Living Room Light Saga

In the living room we were left with a tingly dangly chandelier. It got in the way of everything. So, we bought a new light pendant for £1.50 and took it down. It was then that I discovered that the wiring for lights was significantly more complicated than I thought…

OK, so getting it down wasn’t so bad. But it didn’t have a nice set of connecting blocks, it just had unlabelled wires coming out.

So I read up on what is what, and thought I had it, and attached the new fitting. Power back on aaaand… it lit up. With the switch off. Hmm.

So I took it off again and read up again. Tried to fix it up again aaaand…nothing at all now. OK great, clearly I had no idea what I was doing.

Much swearing and about two days later I bought a multimeter and found the right tests. I determined which were from the switch (on the right) and which were from the loop, and I connected it all up, we turned it on and et voila, we had light!

But. There’s always a but. I had routed the wires around the outside of the rose, not through the hole, so now I couldn’t put the cover on. So it all came off again, and I spent another half hour trying to get everything back in its terminal in an even more restricted space.

I had to do all of this while standing on a chair with my arms raised above my head and my neck stretched back. It was not very fun. Merilynn also had to hold the pendant out of the way of my face so I could see, while standing on another chair off to the side.

But it was a good learning experience, I know what to do next time and I won’t be making that mistake again! We now have a light.

Granted its held up by one screw just about driven into a joist, and doesn’t fit the hole, but its there, and we can see in the evening.

We also flogged the old fitting for a tidy profit of £35 on facebook. The seller wanted to charge us for it, but ended up leaving it, so really we’re quids in.

Oh, and we bought the stepladder right after this…