hudebnik | Home improvement, continued

Picking up on this post...

So Sunday evening we both climbed on chairs and

shalmestere held the new light fixture in place near the ceiling while I connected the wires and tried to screw in the 8 screws that had held the previous light fixture to the ceiling. It was difficult finding the holes and getting the screws into them while holding up a light fixture -- it's not terribly heavy, but anything you're holding over your head for several minutes on end gets wearying quickly. And by the time I was putting in the third screw, the first one would fall out of its hole, and while I was putting in the fourth screw, the second one would turn out not to be in its hole at all but rather just propping the fixture away from the ceiling, and so on. But after a lot of sweating, cursing, and swearing, I got all 8 screws apparently holding, we climbed down from our chairs, I turned on the circuit-breaker and the wall switch... and nothing happened. Obviously one of the wires had become disconnected in the course of all the screw-futzing. But we were both too tired and demoralized to deal with it at the time.

We had other commitments for Monday and Tuesday evenings, so didn't get back to this until Wednesday evening. By which time I had had several ideas:

even if I can't attach the round mounting bracket from which the fixture is supposed to hang by a hook-and-chain, I can probably hang it from something else by a hook and chain, which will mean we don't have to hold it over our heads throughout the process;

the existing screw-holes are probably too torn up by now to hold any weight, and I'll need to put the screws into new holes, moving the fixture at least an inch from where it was before;

if I'm doing that anyway, I have a stud-finder that will tell me where there's something solid to screw into (hoping and praying that there is something somewhere near where the fixture needs to be);

these are self-drilling screws, and the professionals who mounted this thing in 2017 probably put them in with a power drill all at once rather than drilling a hole, matching up the screw with the hole, and driving it in with a screwdriver.

So I climbed up on a chair (and a large coffee-table museum catalogue and the two-volume OED), unscrewed the existing screws (some of which did indeed fall out of their torn-up holes with no unscrewing necessary), and attached the hook between the light fixture and part of the junction box. I reconnected the one wire that had obviously become disconnected, then (with the fixture apparently securely hanging by the hook) flipped the circuit-breaker and the wall switch, and the light came on! Progress!

Next, I used the stud-finder to plot out where there was a wooden stud behind the drywall. Fortunately, there was one running parallel to the long axis of the fixture, not far from where the screws on one side had been drilled before, so I figured I'd only need to move it maybe an inch, not enough to be visibly off-center in the room. No stud on the other side, but I figured four 3-inch screws into wood on one side should be enough to hold the minimal weight of the fixture, with four 3-inch screws into drywall on the other side just stabilizing it a bit.

Next, I grabbed the power drill, put in a screwdriver bit (which I don't think I've ever used before, in the twenty years I've had the drill), and started putting in screws on the stud side. Each screw was about equally likely to go solidly into the ceiling or to push the fixture away from the ceiling, so whenever the latter happened, I backed off, pressed the fixture more tightly against the ceiling, and tried again. Unfortunately, whenever I pressed the fixture against the ceiling, the hanging hook unhooked, so I needed to reconnect it every time I wanted to put my arms down and take a break.

At some point in this process I had another idea:

5) We own a stepladder, which would get me higher up with more stability than standing on the OED on a museum catalogue on a folding chair.

So I retrieved the stepladder from the garage, and with

shalmestere standing on a chair and holding the fixture against the ceiling, managed to drive all four screws on the stud side, which held things firmly enough that she could stop holding and I could drive the other four screws by myself.

The light still worked, and it didn't seem about to fall off. The hanging hook was still poking through the fixture, but I figured that's harmless, and it means it'll still be there if I ever need to take the thing down again.

Attached the diffuser with six fairly-easy toggles, and the light still worked. Yay! Put away stepladder, power drill, drill bits, screwdriver bits, four manual screwdrivers, folding chair, museum catalogue, and OED.

Made raspberry bars from the raspberries we've picked over the past week. Ate them with milk. Walked dogs, brushed teeth, went to bed.