Sunday was a day of DIY.  I had two project.  One was to replace the wax gasket on our toilet.   I never even knew they had wax gaskets. I was pretty sure I needed to replace the sleeve, but didn't know anything about wax gaskets.  But a few google searches later and I was pretty confident I could do it.  I mean, how hard could it be?

The second project was to replace a hanging light in our great room.  I've done this loads of times, so no worries.

We go off to Lowes and get everything we need.

I decide to do the toilet first since I figured that would take the longest.  But  emptying the water, undoing the bolts and lifting it up, replacing the old wax seal (which was yuck) I ended up scraping it off with my expired car plate (It's all we could find), and putting the new one on, and bolting it to the floor only about 40 minutes had passed!   I was impressed with myself and ready to tackle the much easier job of replacing the light.

Sigh!

I held up the new (very heavy) light fixture in place and cut enough of the cable so I could wire it in.   And then worked out the the cable had to actually go through the centre of the colt that held it in place.   Anyway, after feeding the cable through the bolt it wasn't really long enough to wire it in.   SO I had to splice the short cables to longer cable and then wire that to the power cables.   But there was now so much cable, not to mention connectors that When i screwed it to the ceiling it shorted out.   SO I had to take the new lamp apart to rewire it.   Mind you it has 9 bulbs!  it's like a chandelier , so 18 wires!  BLAH!   I rewire it and feed the new longer cable up through and, woohoo, manage to wire it up and then find out the the bolt is too long for our ceiling, which has a metal cross beam which meant the lamp was hanging with a gap.   The only option it to get a shorter bolt.   Off we go to Lowes again and I show them what I want.  "Aha," says the guy, "You need a steel nipple."   I do a double take and then follow him with some trepedation.  He hands me a packet and woudln't you know it, on the packet they are called steel nipples.   I take my nipples home and use the shorter one to hang the chandelier.  Put in a bulb and flip the breakers and OH MY GOD IT WORKS!!!!   Amazing how bright 9 40watt bulbs are.  We'll probably never turn the thing on again.

It took over 4 hours to put this stupid lamp up.   But Gale loves it, so it's all worth while.  Next project is to get a dimmer switch for it, so we can actually turn it on without burning our retinas and stop planes trying to land in our garden.


Here's the Lamp