A Shiny New Porch Light = More Projects on the List

Have you ever finished a project that looked great and was a huge improvement, but when you stepped back and surveyed the overall picture, it made you realize that its shiny newness just highlights the need for more projects? It happened to us when our much anticipated porch light from Lowes was finally delivered.

We removed our dilapidated old porch light with the missing glass pane someone had obviously smashed out in an effort to get a CFL bulb in the fixture. Being the front door light and all, the smashed out pane was one of the first things we noticed (right after the shed that was falling in on itself) when we first viewed the house and was high up on the "things we must replace" list.
Pretty gross, don't you think? We know that our little beehive isn't our forever home, as much as we love it here. We're not fooling ourselves into thinking that we won't have to move again for S's job, and frankly this summer has me dreaming of a house in Maine where I have a gaggle of friends and the summers are ah-ma-zing. So, I think we often still look at our house from the view of sellers trying to appeal to the most buyers, as we did when we were selling in Florida. And having an entry fixture like this is just a big no-no when it's a cheap and easy fix to upgrade to something new and clean.

So the other day after getting a call from friends saying that they were 45 minutes away, we decided to do a quick swap-out. Because who doesn't install a new porch light just to show off to friends? We've honed our skills in the electrical department at our hive, so we knew 45 minutes was pleannnnty of time. I consulted the master electrical circuitry spreadsheet my dad created over the course of the past eight months, and killed the power to the porch (plus the little room, half the living room, a sconce in the basement, etc. I know, it makes no sense).

S made quick work of removing the old fixture, and had it in a box for the trash (above) before I was even upstairs from the basement, and I didn't even stop for a popsicle and cold iced tea along the way. We then unpacked the new fixture, being careful not to break its bubble glass dome (side note, I LOVE the way the bubble glass matches the pendant in the kitchen). S stepped up on the porch chair, used the new wire nuts that came with the light to attach the hot and neutral wires to the fixture, wrapped the ground around the grounding nut/wire and secured the whole fixture in place...all while I snapped a few photos of the old light. By the time I turned the camera lens up to snap a shot of his progress, he was securing the metal criss-cross protectors around the glass dome. I wasn't kidding when I said we've honed our skills!
And that's when it happened.... I stepped back to take a photo of our glorious new light and it struck me that the yellow glue-like remnants on the porch ceiling, from what I can only assume was someone else's duct tape fiasco, were making our new light look bad.

So this fall when it finally cools down to I-actually-want-to-be-outside, this-weather-feels-like-summer-in-Maine temperatures and I take on the door painting project, I'll pull out a little step stool and some goo-be-gone, which I hope will remove the mess. If not, we'll be adding "paint vinyl porch ceiling" to our to-do list, and as you can see from the list at right, we're certainly not wanting for projects at our beehive.

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