Monday, September 2, 2013

Ceiling Fans!

It's been a while since I've written a blog.  We've been pretty busy this summer, not any any big projects on the house, mostly maintenance things around the house, we've had family visit and visited family and John's been pretty busy with work, than there hasn't been a lot going on.  I've been working on a couple projects, since I'm not finished, I'm not ready to blog about any of those yet, so that leaves me here with like a month gap in my blog :(

Until today!  Yesterday and today John and I put up new ceiling fans in the guest room and the office.  I didn't get a whole lot of pictures of the process, so while this may be a short blog, I am hoping it is the first into my regular blogs. :)

We have been talking about putting up ceiling fans in the other bedrooms since we put up the one in ours.  Mainly because none the bedrooms had overhead lights in the rooms, the light switch just flipped on an electrical socket.  The other reason was to have extra airflow and to cool the rooms down.  John decided he wanted to do it a few weeks back, but due to being extremely busy at work, that just wasn't an option.  However, I looked online for some fans and we ended up looking around one day while we were at Canadian Tire.  We saw NOTHING we liked, except the one we had already bought, but we didn't want to buy it at full price, so we figured we would just have to watch and wait for it to go on sale before we would be able to do them.  Then my mom told us this really cool thing.  On the Canadian Tire app, you can look up items you want and then set them on this list to alert you when the item goes on sale.  We did that and this past Friday John got the alert!  We were excited because a) the app worked and b) we were finally going to be able to put the fans in.  He went and picked them up that night to make sure we got them.

We didn't get started on them until last night, as John's mom and nephew were here for the weekend.  After relaxing for a bit, we decided to get started after supper.  Probably not the best idea because it gets darker earlier these days, plus it was cloudy.  We made due though, both shining flashlights around to get things and see what we are going.  We only got the one fan out and the whole cut in the ceiling and John started on the wiring, when he realized that it was going to be a bigger job than anticipated.  He found that something had chewed the wires down to the metal wire, so it was now a fire hazard, plus trying to get the new wire down to the light switch was going to mean cutting holes in the wall, at this point we decided to call it a night and work on it today.

Fan accessories and tools everywhere


The hole!

The garbage is almost filled and we had barely started!

My poor desk chair.
Today, I had a friend come over, so John did the majority of the office fan by himself.  I came in and helped him get the fan blades together and pass him screws to finish the assembly.  Due to some set backs in the wiring and poor instructions (or poor reading of the instructions) it took a little longer than expected, but it meant we learned what we needed to do for the next fan.  Here is how it looks in the office!


After finishing the office fan, we had a brief lunch break and then got back to work.  John got all he needed to do the wiring and began measuring and cutting the hole for the fan.  I took everything out of the fan box and started to assemble the fan blades and the ceiling fan to the mount, in between running up and down the stairs to grab things for John or just getting up to help in some way.  We had a little set back when trying to get the wire through all the plates, but once we got that everything went together smoothly.  I cleaned everything up while John replaced the light switch and electrical socket with new ones.  I've been slowly changing all of them in the house because the previous owner painted over all of them and we do not like that.  Anyways, here is how it looks in the guest room.


Well we are one step closer to redoing the whole house.  For now, we are going to rest for the rest of the day.  Hope everyone had a nice long weekend!