Let There Be Light. Please!

I have hung a new bathroom fixture in the hall bath. Why? Well...the old light fixture had burned out 2 of the new CFL bulbs in 3 months (both on the same side), and since they're supposed to last for years I was getting nervous that there was a short or something in the old fixture. So OUT it went. And when it came down, guess what I found? The whole socket was hanging on by a thread. Nick of time!

I tried to have the new fixture hung before everyone got home from school/work so it could surprise them when they turned on the light. Before the "hanging" project got started I had to mount a metal "plate" to the outlet box that was behind the sheet rock. Unfortunately for me, the directions left out one, key step of how to attach the light fixture to the "plate" that you just mounted on the outlet box.

(Various shapes and sizes of outlet boxes)

The problem was that the "fixture screws" (that I put through the plate before I mounted it to the wall) were too long. When I added the decorative "nut", that shows on the front of the fixture to hold it on to the wall, there was way too much room between the nut and the surface of the fixture. Like about 1/4 of an inch of screw was showing, NOT securing the fixture to the plate. So because I thought I put the wrong screws in, I found myself re-hanging the thing to put in shorter screws. Which meant I had to take off the fixture AND the plate.

I did this several times with several increasingly shrinking screws (maybe 5 mount jobs in all for this one fixture). I finally called the customer service number and they told me that I had skipped the step about how to adjust the "little nuts" on the "fixture screws". I looked back over the directions and this step WAS NOT THERE. Very frustrating.

Basically the fixture screws got threaded out of the back of the plate and their little nuts hold them tightly in place. Bad thing was that when I went to reattach everything to the wall, the screw heads stuck out of the back of the plate. which they were supposed to do. But since the outlet box wasn't exposed (because it had been sheet rocked over, remember) there was no empty space for the screw heads to back into. So, after detaching everything again, I took a screw driver and poked holes in the sheet rock so that the screw heads could back into the space inside the outlet box.

After all of this, it was very rewarding to show off the new fixture to the family. I didn't get it done in time for the children to be surprised by it, but they got to enjoy helping me finish and getting it ready for when Bryan got home.

And man...I had no idea that there could be so much light! It's almost blinding.