Shine a little light...

Lighting is one of my favorite things to shop for. Seriously, when it comes to home decor, Im a big fan of lighting. Mainly because there are so many options out there and lighting can seriously change the look of a room.

It might also be because the lighting in this house was terrible when we moved in. Every single light fixture had a bulb burnt out. Every single one (we checked). Thats got be a record or something.

There are still many fixtures we want to change, but so far we've done about 6 main ones...not bad. Recently my mother in law mentioned to me that all of our fixtures were very 'sparkly'. I hadn't actually thought about it, but she's right....every single one is 'sparkly'. I now feel that someone needs to stop me from buying sparkly fixtures....oddly enough, Ian doesn't seem to mind or even care. Huh.

Anyho, this is my last sparkly fixture for a while. I swear.
Dont judge the sparkly fixture lady!

So our master bedroom has a hallway to leads into our bathroom and into our closets. It had a bulb hanging from the ceiling when we moved in (have I proved my point about bad lighting now?)

I wanted to change it out, but we didn't want to spend a lot of money on a light for this little hallway.

Months ago, my parents we renovating one of their properties, and had removed the old fixtures. I remember walking in to see what they had done, and spotting 2 old chandeliers. My parents graciously let me have them (Ian wasn't crazy about the idea at first...), but I could see their potential. Problem was, they were covered in nicotine from the previous owner (who was a heavy smoker). Ewww (now you can see why no one else wanted them).

I brought them home, took them apart and let all of the crystals soak in soapy water for a full day. After a few days of cleaning and preping, the chandeliers looked ammmmazing! The first one had to be rewired and Im saving it for another room in our home :) The second one was perfect for our hallway...perfect and FREE!

Putting up this fixture was another story...

The hallway began looking like this:

and after 2 evenings, 1 very frustrated husband and a few words that are too inappropriate to type, we ended up with this:

A close up of the sparkle sparkle....

and it even looks pretty with the lights off:

Do you see the ring around the top of the light? That was originally gold, but I used silver leaf paint, to paint it silver. Turned out pretty well. I got the paint from Michael's, and you dont need much at all to cover a surface- I barely used anything in the small jar to cover the entire ring (inside and out).

At night it casts a really neat shadow on the walls too:

I think it adds a bit of vintage flair to the room, and of course more "sparkle, sparkle". He he.

I love it. Funny thing, how often did I previously turn this light on for use? Barely ever. How often do I turn it on now? Every day. lol

As I said before, lighting really makes a difference!