Our recent master closet redo has me itching to finish out our adjoining master bath once and for all. Here’s a little history of the above-eye-level portion of our master bath and what happened when we tried to DIY a new light fixture for it.
This is what the bathroom ceiling looked like when we bought our house. This shot was taken just before I climbed on the ladder and started scraping the popcorn ceiling (hence the blue painter’s tape and tarps). Note the $5 white globe light fixture, yellow fan vent, and space-age heat register. 🙂
As I scraped and painted the ceiling, I decided something had to be done about that light fixture. So I scoured our garage and found this light that we’d taken down from our entryway almost immediately after moving in.
It was a very gothic-looking cage-style light, but I thought I could spruce it up with some paint, at least for a temporary fix.
Let us pause for a moment and note that our house as we purchased it had not one, two, or three, but FOUR white globe-style light fixtures in sight when standing at one end of the hallway and looking towards the back deck. (There’s a globe further down the hall that you can’t see in this photo.) Haha! At least they were consistant with their cheap lighting in this place!
Anyway, back to the cage. Over the summer, I spray painted the cage in a brushed nickel finish to match the other elements in our bathroom.
Then Stephen hung the light, and the ceiling has pretty much looked like this for the past year. Yes, the ceiling paint is still creeping down our unpainted walls, but at least the vent cover is white instead of yellow now!
After we hung our new closet light fixture, I just couldn’t stand that little cage any longer. Taking into consideration that Stephen has hated “the cage” since we bought the house, it was time for a change.
I got the bright idea to DIY the fixture to look like the $50 one in our closet, so we got out the Dremel. Stephen started by cutting the cage off of the pendant part of the light.
Two little cuts and we said buh-bye to the cage! Any suggestions on what I can do with the leftover parts? Some kind of decor maybe?
Next, we took the remaining pendant piece and a drum shade I yanked from our entryway lamp, and we hung the resulting fixture up to see how it looked!
Whomp-whommmp. Cue disappointed sound effects here. From certain angles the light looked ok, and it was definitely a good size, but this photo shows how crooked it is!
We tried and tried to make it hang straight, but it just looks cheap and off-balanced. Not quite the sophisticated look I was going for.
The result? No hard-earned dollars were harmed in the making of this light fixture, so it was worth a shot.
Since our failed DIY, I’ve whipped out the plastic yet again and ordered up another Eden pendant for our master bath. I guess the up-side is that now our bathroom has a slim shot of being almost as classy as our closet! Who else do you know who can say the most finished room in their house is the closet? I guess my little bit of ridiculous is what keeps ’em coming back! 🙂
Have you ever had a DIY project not work out? Did you keep trying or end up replacing it with something off-the-shelf? I’d love to hear your thoughts!
I’m linking to The Nester’s Risk Party.
