DIY: New Dining Room Chandelier

Do it yourself projects (or DIY, as the kids say these days) are all the rage-- and can save you some serious dough. If you know what you're doing, that is.  I'm the first to admit that I have few skills in the home improvement arena, however, when we decided to replace our generic ceiling fan/light that was in our dining room, installing a new dining room chandelier was one project I was confident I could do.

We'd been searching for a new ceiling fan/chandelier combo but just couldn't find one we liked. So, we decided to take out the fan and just go with a chandelier, seeing as there were many more options from which to choose. After looking online, we headed out to a local home improvement store to see the one we liked in person.  Turns out the light we liked online, we ended up not liking in person. However, we found another light we both liked, and one that looked like it would work in our dining room. So, we bought it.

We brought it home and set about taking the old ceiling fan/light down and installing the new one. Now, this is not a terribly difficult task to those who do such tasks for a living. However, my experience has usually been that these projects, which seem simple on the surface, never really are as simple as they seem. Something never works the way it's supposed to. Whether it's the confusing directions, or something odd in our home that isn't the way it should be, it's seemed there was always something that would go wrong. However, instead of my usual this-is-not-gonna-work attitude, I was confident we could install the new light with a minimum of distress.

Turns out, we did!  There was only one minor redo in our project-- where we had to remove the mounting strap to thread the cord through the hollowed out middle anchor-- but we got it wired correctly and anchored to the ceiling without too much problem. And, after turning the power back on, the light actually lit up like it's supposed to. Without setting our house on fire. And, it hasn't fallen off the ceiling-- at least not yet, anyway.

Just goes to show you that with a positive attitude, and a partner with whom you work well (that's a hat tip to my incredible wife), you can get a lot accomplished... when you do it yourself!