Lighting Upgrade - Bathroom

Bonus tip, always remember to stop your drain so you don't
lose your screws and such down the drain.

Yesterday we showed you all of the glorious light fixtures we had illuminating our home when we purchased it.  Today, we have our first light replacement project and it begins in the bathroom.  Over the weekend, we had heard of a huge sale taking place at the Lights Unlimited store so we shimmied on over early Saturday morning for their "yard sale" and incredible prices.  We arrived before the sale was supposed to begin but there were already people there gobbling up all of the awesome light deals.  We did happen to snag a light fixture for our bathroom - a mere $10, originally $135 or something crazy like that (I wonder if they just put random high prices on those things so you think you are getting an out of this world deal) either way, we got a great deal.  We also found outdoor lighting that we will be pulling out when the right time comes (get the house painted first).  So when King Silas went down for his nap we Justin got to work on replacing that light.  I was there for moral support, I guess.

The first thing we did was to determine which fuse belonged to the bathroom so we could get the electricity turned off while Justin worked.  This was actually more time consuming than originally thought, it took us going through the fuses 3 times before we figured out which one it was - partly because we had unscrewed all of the bulbs in the bathroom first and had no light to go by.   Hey, we are rookie remodelers remember?  We did eventually find it and got the electricity off.

This is a nice picture of the collection of dust on our old fixture.

Next, Justin got to work removing the old light fixture.  This was simple enough - just unscrewing the fixture base and straps and disconnecting the electrical wires.

This is our old light fixture but you can see the different colored wires here.

Then he began installing the new light fixture by matching up the colored electrical wires and connecting them together.  You first begin with the white wires (they are the neutral wires), then the black wires (the hot wires) and finally the copper (the grounding wires).  The wirenuts are then put on to hold them in place.

This is Justin working on the ground wire - you can see from comparing to the picture above the difference in fixture straps - the new one has an extra swivel strap for adjustment.

The fixture strap is the next piece that is screwed into the wall.  Since our lighting is fairly old we did have a different type of fixture strap that we removed than what we installed.  Basically our old one had one single strap and the new one had two, with one being able to swivel to adjust to the appropriate level.  Justin adjusted the strap accordingly and screwed it into the wall.  This will give you a level light fixture.

The last piece to install was the actual light fixture base, which was simply screwed into place.

After everything was installed we popped in some light bulbs, turned the electrical fuse back on and enjoyed our $10 light upgrade.

This project was actually pretty easy to do and I am liking the added elegance this new light has added to our bathroom.  It has really stepped up the class in there.  I guess I should add that before we moved into our house we had a licensed electrician go through our entire house and address any issues we had - so we knew going into this project that everything was properly wired and functional before starting.  Now that we have this new light we are feeling pretty fancy and we will be on the hunt for more lighting updates in the future.

So here is the before and after on our little diy light fixture upgrade project:

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