Lights, Action, Oops!

If you believe the archive listing on the right hand side of my blog, today is my 6th blogiversary! My (apparent) first post was a picture of some aphids on my roses.

I say apparent, because from that post until late May 2010, I was actually posting my photos on Facebook, not here. When I decided to delete myself from that application, I started this blog and moved all the photos to it. So in a few days I created 8 months of blog posts.

Six years ago I don't think I could have dreamed I would be where I am today. I did own this land, but couldn't see how I would ever be able to afford to build on it. But here I am!

Today's task was to assemble the light fittings I first tried to do a couple of weeks back. Remember this?

 I had two of these, and both were missing the plastic pins needed to assemble them. When I contacted the distributors, initially they said they would send me the pins, then 10 days later they said they wouldn't as they thought the lights could be assembled without the pins. I had a go, but it really seemed to need something to hold the first bits together. I found some small rivets that fitted the holes, so today was the day to get these light shades happening!

Before:

Not very exciting so far. However, the instructions show how to assemble the shade on a flat surface before the electrician installs the light fitting, but I had to assemble it above my head and from the reverse view, so it got exciting fast.

First step. The first 5 segments in place. Getting to this stage took me about half an hour, with the rivets to hold pieces in place. Without them I would probably have given up! It was very tricky manipulating them, and also interpreting the instructions which were far from clear.

Second step. The next 5 pieces in place. Once I had the first part together, the rest was very quick. But round about now I realised this was going to be a very big light shade:

Because that's only half of it.

Third step:

And the final step:

 It is huge! Fortunately we have higher than average ceilings, so I can walk under it. But it is much larger than I imagined. The box did say how big it was (530mm diameter), but somehow I never quite registered just how big that is. I imagined it would be about as big as the box.

It does look quite amazing when you turn on the light though:

So now I have one of these in the spare bedroom, and one in my sewing room. They make me laugh because they are so over-sized, so I might just leave them because it will be fun to watch people's reactions.