Chad and I spent friday working together to put up two ceiling fans in the house. First though, he let me drag him to Home Depot, then to Lowes, then to Ray Lighting, then back to Home Depot before we picked them out. I had already chosen the one for the kitchen...but Chad and his brother quickly found out that the "Hampton Bay" fan was a piece of crap. The blades were scraping on the motor housing, and there seemed to be something wrong with the motor...it wouldn't go on high and made this awful grinding sound. So he exchanged it for the only other one of the same model they had left...and tried again to put it up. No scraping this time, but the same motor problem. We had to argue with the woman at Home Depot to take it back. Even though we had the receipt...he hadn't had it when he even-exchanged the fan before...and for some reason the UPC number on the new fan's box didn't match the UPC on the receipt for the original fan even though they were identical. The packaging for the second one was pretty beat up...so I bet it had been sitting on the shelf a long time cause nobody wanted it...it was the LAST one.

We decided to try a similarly styled "Hunter" fan for a little more $$$. Went up without any problems...but we still had the same motor issues. We figured there must be something screwed up with the wiring. We are not electricians...we have just enough electrical smarts to match the ground wires to each other, and match black to black and white to white. (And to have the power turned off while we are working!) I am thankful the house has newer and "normal" wiring. You never know what you are going to find in older houses once you take a light down. The next day, I figured out what the problem was...there are two switches for that light on opposite sides of the room. One is a dimmer knob. The dimmer has to be turned all the way up even if the other switch is on...otherwise it doesn't give the fan enough power.

So now what we need to do, it replace the dimmer with a normal "on" and "off" switch. I want to make things a little more complicated, and separate the wires for the two switches so that the light can work by the dimmer without affecting the fan. Thing is, there is only one set of wires coming out of the ceiling...and about 4 feet of insulation over the ceiling at this point. I don't really want to dig through the pink itchy stuff to try to locate and split and splice wires in the cramped, dark, and stuffy attic.

Saturday, I took my mom and sister out to the house and we cleaned the kitchen, and started putting a lot of my stuff away. There is a bunch more I have to go deal with after work today, because it is on the carpet...and the cleaners are supposed to come tomorrow.

Labels: homeownershipness