Ceiling Fan Light - blue room

<-- Before photo

So far as DIY projects go, this weekend has been a very productive weekend for us.

This week, we decided to tackle ceiling fan lights and what triggered this DIY frenzy was that when we set up Swe-cha's study area downstairs and moved our torchlight beside his table, it left the blue room dark. Blue room is where the husband set up his home office, it does have an existing ceiling fan with a light, but the light is a single halogen bulb and it gives off a dim, yellow light. 

I started looking for electricians and getting quotes for installing overhead lights (recessed lights, most probably) and found that it will cost between $500 - $700 to get them installed and this quote snowballed when I also concluded that since we were going to have someone come and do this, we might as well get lights installed in the 4th bedroom as well. 4th BR is a longer room and will probably require 6 lights and will cost another $800 - $900. 

Now that we were looking at around $1600,... it didn't seem so simple anymore. 

So I started looking at what we already have and what we can do.... and it occurred to me that we already have ceiling fans installed in ALL BEDROOMS! So perhaps we can just go on from there.

It took a while but I did find the Minka-Aire K9515-1 Universal 12 1/4" light kit with frosted white glass. This was a good fit for blue room because it had a low profile. It takes 3 candelabra bulbs (E12 base) and hubby quickly found 100w-equivalent daylight bulbs for it. 

Cost: 

- $41 for the Minka-Aire light kit

- two 2-pack Feit 100w equivalent daylight bulbs for $17 each. Yep, the bulbs almost cost as much as the light kit itself).

- Labor: free 

Also found this awesome fixture from Amazon for $8 - it attaches to a single bulb socket and allows you to attach 5 more bulbs. We installed this in our garage where we only have the 1 bulb in the ceiling and instantly, the place looks so much brighter. 

Pictured is the new light fixture with five 60-watt equivalent daylight LED bulbs (just 8 watts each). Suddenly, it makes our garage so much brighter and I see how old & dingy-looking the garage is - we'll probably want to plan for a garage-related cleanup & remodeling project next spring.