home improvement...

*Uhhhggghhhaaa* (think Tim Allen's grunt on Home Improvement)

I feel like a man... a real man.
We just happened to go to Lowe's today, which always makes me feel pretty masculine, but today we decided, "Hey, let's buy a new chandelier for the dining room and a new light over our bar in the kitchen"...

It was somewhat of a planned impulse buy... something we'd planned on doing for awhile, but something we just didn't have time to do nor money to buy.

So we are looking through the lighting section at Lowe's, and we find the one's that we want... a neat chandelier and a light that hangs from a cable with a very very cool glass colored bulb thing that covers it... so we get all that stuff and then make a quick trip to Wal-Mart where we bought this outdoor clock to put out on the brick wall on our deck.

When we got home, I had a LOT to do... so I immediately got to work... the first thing I did was begin drilling a hole into the brick in the backyard... 20 minutes later, I had a hole and a masonry screw in the wall with a clock hanging from it! One down, 2 more projects to go.

Next I went to take down the old light... disconnected the old wiring, and stripped cabling to reconnect the new light with the new wiring. I decided, "eh, you know what? I'm good enough at this, I'll go ahead and put the cool glass slash semi-expensive bulb colored cover thing on"... you can already tell where this is going. Yep! Got the wiring connected and as I was was fixing to put the screw in to hold the light fixture in place, it all came tumbling down and the cool glass slash semi-expensive bulb colored cover thing shattered into about 1000 pieces over our living room, kitchen and dining room. So Jamie took another trip to Lowe's to get a replacement cool glass slash semi-expensive bulb colored cover thing... and now, voila!

After that, I went ahead and did the same thing to our current chandelier, stripping the wiring, getting the new one ready to hang. Let me tell you, this was the first time I've ever installed a chandelier, so the whole "chain" thing was totally trial and error... and it took me an hour to install.

But it too turned out good... except we broke TWO energy efficient bulbs (which I guess are highly toxic with mercury?)... so then we spent the rest of our night cleaning the floors, vacuuming up multiple sections of broken glass and bulbs, and then making sure our house was mercury free... which is slightly impossible to tell.

So hopefully we live through the night and all is well...
I do indeed feel like a man... I felt as though I did some pretty intense home improvement projects today! Doing some electrical wiring and ensuring the safety of all eating at our dining room table underneath our newly installed chandelier... ha!