Newlywed Chronicles #5: If you give a mouse a cookie...

It started with a chandelier.

This is the chandelier that came with our house. It really doesn't go with the age of the house, the judges paneling, or our Pottery Barn table. After months of looking for just the right one, we got our chandelier. By the way, thanks to my sweet sweet Dad for hanging last Thursday.

But then I decided we needed a new ceiling fan in the den. When Graham told me there was nothing wrong with the current one, I told him it was brass and ugly. No offense to people with brass ceiling fans, it's just not my taste. Using my sales training, I tried to find his pain spot. I told him it was really hard for me to reach the pulls to turn it on because I'm short. We REALLY need one with a remote. Well, well, well. His face lights up as he considers adding a remote to his arsenal and soon we are on the way to Lowe's looking for a new fan with remote.

Last Saturday, Graham set out to swap out the fan. Having done this many times before, he got to work (note he's in his PJ's...this is going to be so quick and easy). Our first sign of trouble is the sighting of NAILS in the ceiling instead of screws. Must be another housewarming gift from the prior owners. They were kind enough to sprinkle these little gifts throughout the house. Graham spent HOURS getting them out and getting rid of that brass and rattan nastiness. After 8 hours of ugly words that he supposedly gave up for lent, we had a new [pretty] ceiling fan. We turned the fuse back on and flipped the magic on switch to a fan that DID NOT WORK.

For my sanity, he decided to call for reinforcements. His brother-in-law came over the next day to help get it going. They did some switcharoo with the wires and got it going. His payment? A ping pong table. No, we didn’t give him one, he gave us one. Not a bad deal right? But back to the fan, so, after Jason left we were trying our hardest to enjoy our new fan. It’s hard to enjoy a fan when it’s snowing outside. So here we are, watching the snow fall with the lights on and fan off when CLICK -- the lights switched off and the fan came on. High speed. What the heck? Crap. Somewhere the wires are surely still crossed. I tell Graham it’s not a big deal and it probably has to break itself in (yeah right, this thing is spooked). A few minutes later I smell a burning smell. Awesome. Graham is pretty irritated at this point b/c it’s taken the entire weekend to install this stupid sucker and it’s still not working. I’m trying not to be dramatic here, but thinking how in the heck is a fire truck going to get to our house right now? We’ve got 5-7 inches of snow and everyone in Atlanta is rushing to Kroger to get enough bread and milk to last them for a couple of weeks. Seriously, somewhere in the not so distant past Atlanta MUST have been snowed in for weeks at a time, right?

Side tracked again, back to the fan. On Tuesday I used our handy dandy home warranty to get an electrician to come take a look. He was able to explain the burning smell and assure me the house will not burn down. We couldn’t get the problem with the fan coming on whenever it wants to replicate, so we assumed it was gone. As you can imagine, it became possessed again the minute he left. Actually, as I've been typing this blog the lights have gone off and the fan has come on. A girl can't have everything can she? I quickly moved on and busied myself with my next decorating project.

Since we no longer had the brass fan we really didn’t need the shiny brass fire place facing either. It’s gone now too.

We are so spoiled by our fan in the den, we’ve decided the one in the bedroom needs to be replaced because it’s noisy (and ugly). I predict that will be good blog fodder as well.

We put up new window treatments in the living room and I liked them so much we got some for the dining room. That made me decide I really didn't like that color scheme at all, even though I have my new blue walls and my new chandelier. Maybe it's the red shag rug. Soooo, we moved the red shag rug into the breakfast room and made it a keeping room. Then, the kitchen windows got jealous because they had no new fancy window treatments. Fortunately I had 4 spare yards of dream fabric tucked away for a rainy day.