Thing #26: The Accidental Thing

Imagine, if you will, a dining room.  You quietly hate it upon moving into the house, but it’s kind of low on the list of priorities – WAY below the butterflies-and-flowers in the kitchen that went the first weekend I was in the house.

And even less hideous than the cutesy flower wallpaper borders in what became Surly Boy‘s bedroom or the ridiculously busy wallpaper in the closet-sized bathroom.

Wallpaper, in some form or another, in Every Room Of The House.

So yeah, I guess what I’m saying is that, 10 years ago, my house was, essentially, a fixer-upper, and somewhere along the line it became a liver-wither.

Dude.  I have ALWAYS hated that ceiling fan.  For one thing, it’s too low, and I hate the pouffy globes on the light kit – almost as much as the faux-brass etching on the fan blades.

And don’t even get me started on the Stupid Special Light Bulbs – the bulbs that need replacing roughly every other week.

Now add to that the fact that a few years ago, Surly Boy thought it would be a good idea to squirt a water bottle at the ceiling.

Doesn’t seem like such a big deal, does it?  Try it on your own ceiling.

You’ll end up with squirty-water-spots on the ceiling that will not come off,  no matter how much you try to wash the ceiling, short of a new paintjob, and possibly a coat of primer first.

So the thing about kids in general, and boys in particular?

You learn to live with things.  After a couple of years, you barely see that squirty-water-spot anymore.

But you know it’s there.

And finally, you decide that you have Had Enough.  You canNOT STAND this mess another day.

And that’s that.

And it only made sense, if we were going to repaint the ceiling, to replace the fan.  After all, if we did it that way, we wouldn’t have to tape off the old, hated fan before painting, right?

So first we painted the ceiling, covering the table (and rug) with a drop cloth, and hoping for the best in the rest of the room (I dripped some paint on the chair – crap! – and on the living room carpet – oops!  Guess what’s going next.)

And we let the paint dry overnight on Saturday, then, bright and early Sunday morning, we went to work on replacing the old, hideous, hated ceiling fan with a new, cool, lovely one.

Taking the old fan down wasn’t that hard – it was a simple matter of unscrewing stuff and throwing it into a box.

And when it came to the new fan, well, we had installation instructions, and as long as we followed the step-by-step, we couldn’t go wrong, right?  (PSA:  if you’re going to remove the overhead light from a room, try to make sure you have another light source – you’re gonna want to see what you’re doing when you’re rearranging electrical wires.)

As an aside.  Have you ever noticed that dogs HATE an upset to their routine?  I mean, a simple thing like having Mama and Papa walking around the table via dining room chairs just . . . freaks them out.  Nice.

And, in the case of a fan with a light kit, you first install the fan, then the light.  Great.  You don’t actually want to turn anything on until it’s all together, though.

So we wrestled and struggled and got every piece put together (except for one random screw that, for the life of us, neither one of us can figure out where it goes), and we hit the power and . . . lights, but no fan.

Seriously?

Obviously, the power is connected, since we have lights. . . and really, do we want to dismantle the ENTIRE THING to return it, just so we can do it all over again?

Cuz, um, we’ve just removed the only source of light from the dining room.  It needs to be resolved – now.

So anyway, Peeps started loosening the light kit (which, I’ll be honest, was a PIG to attach!) and something told him to try the power again.

And VOILA!  The lights still worked, AND the fan worked too!

Our work here is DONE!

Then it occurred to me . . . wasn’t that – a new ceiling fan – one of my Things?

I guess I’m just that good, huh?