frick hanging fixtures. Its always a hassle.

Over the weekend I hung a 47 ton chandelier from a 12.5' ceiling where there were so many issues with the box that I might as well have had sex with the ceiling as much time as my face was plastered to it. I won't cite all the issues except to say that you have to get very fricking creative sometimes to make things work.

I followed that up spending over an hour connecting a dimmer for it (too bright the wife says) messing around with the 3 gang box where i was having to put in 2 blanks (1 switch used to control the top outlet of plugs on that wall and the other was never used at all) and i made the mistake of capping all the wires before i came back to install the dimmer and forgot which was which.

Of course the fun did not end there; because we are painting the house I removed the 2 fixtures on either side of the front door only to discover the 2 boxes they installed were from like 1940s Russia and absolutely nothing would fit them so I spent 2 hours in home depot rigging up a system involving a vinyl square, shims, drilling holes in the square to mount the metal light plate permanently to it, having to dremel the screws i bought because they ended up being too long, finding out the whole wood-shim-behind-the-plate-to-make-the-existing-box-work was a complete disaster and getting so frustrated I just ran a 3" deck screw into the back of the vinyl plate into the side of the house which actually solved the problem much faster than all the careful planning i did to avoid punching a hole in the side of the house.

All of this while the wife is standing there saying "don't you just need to connect 2 wires?"