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Lightening Up + Heading Out

Posted by
February 20, 2012

A while back we bought this light for $29 at the Pottery Barn outlet. We originally planned to hang it over our sink “someday when we redid the kitchen” but then we got our oil-rubbed bronze pendant lights for over the peninsula, and although we love mixed metals, we just thought this silver + mercury glass light didn’t jive with them. So we started thinking about hanging it in a bathroom or something.

 

Then I asked tall John to hold it up as if it was hanging over the sink and surprisingly the shape was perfect. But the silver neck, black string, and silver ceiling cap were all wrong. But the glittering mercury glass shade was perfect (it tied into the chrome faucet and the stainless appliances and hardware). It was like a roller coaster. Perfect, all wrong, perfect. So I decided to call on my good friend ORB (oil-rubbed bronze spray paint with built-in primer) to take care of the all wrong department…

I figured giving it the same finish to help tie it into the other lighting over the peninsula was worth a shot.

A few thin and even coats later, I was left with a glossy oil-rubbed bronze fixture…

… that I couldn’t wait to hang above the sink and rinse dishes under.

I gave him a full day of drying time, just to be sure everything cured up and then up he went. It’s pretty cool how the dark finish helps balance the room and ties the pendants together, even though their shades are really different.

The new guy over the sink is sort of the “bridge” between the ORB pendants and the stainless/chrome/silver items touches in the room thanks to the gleaming mercury glass.

With our new stainless steel dishwasher installed (we actually did that this weekend by sliding a few pieces of cork under it without having to do the rest of the flooring quite yet – just have to take pics and write that post!) the room has even more balance now, since we have a silver thing on each side of the room. We didn’t plan that when we redid the layout, but it’s nice that it ended up that way (the dishwasher and fridge used to be sort of next to each other before we moved the fridge across the room).

Oh and we get requests to take photos of light installation but it’s rough to do since one of us holds the light while the other one wires it up (aka: no extra hands for photo or video taking) but if you search light installation videos I think they have a few good ones on youtube.

The little hexegons on the mercury glass shade make me really happy. I honestly think this fixture looks so much better with dark hardware to complement the cool silver shade. It’s so pretty and sparkly yet the dark tone sort of grounds it and makes it feel substantial and luxe.

We totally could have gone with another $60 outlet pendant over the sink like the ones over the peninsula, but there’s something really fun about having a light that goes, but doesn’t match exactly. And it’s a bit smaller in scale, which is kind of nice since the sink is a little less open and giant than the big ol’ peninsula.

Here are some “it’s on” shots for ya:

Now onto the “heading out” portion of this post’s title. As many of you know, we’re psyched and honored to be speaking at the Home & Garden show in Portland, Oregon this Wednesday. Which means we’ll be traveling for a lot of this week (hence us doing lots of projects this weekend, like the already-installed dishwasher, so we have lots to share with you throughout the week as we travel, speak, and travel again). We’re flying all day on Tuesday and are booked to be there pretty much all day on Wednesday the 22nd (from 5:30am to 8pm with just a few breaks for blogging and eating) and we’ll be giving an invite-only blogging seminar in the afternoon (they’re in charge of who gets invites, so maybe check their site/Facebook page for those details). But at 5:30pm there’s a Meet & Greet in the Smart House Remodel in Hall D. Anyone can show up for that, but they suggest your register. We’d love to meet you guys there!

Burger is actually staying back (with a house-sitter of course) since we thought it might be too stressful for him to travel there and back without much down time – but Clara is coming since we’ll actually have John’s mom and dad with us (they have family out in Portland so they decided to join us, which is a fun and very helpful plan).

 

So please forgive us if this week of posting is erratic and wonky! We’re going to do our best to get posts up at the regularly scheduled times, but there will definitely be moments when we’re in the air or at the show when we just can’t hop on and answer comment questions or get the next post up – so it might get a little funky. We tend to approve comments as we answer questions, so if you submit something and don’t see it pop up, we’re likely just waiting to get a moment to answer it or haven’t seen it yet!

But we can’t even tell you how excited we are to check out Portland (neither of us have ever been, but we have a list a mile long of things to check out, and of course we’ll blog about our home-related adventures during our fleeting two-day trip). Oh and to ensure that we’ll fit right in, we’ve been watching clips from Portlandia.

Sounds like a solid act-like-a-local plan, right?

In all seriousness, I’m not the best with public speaking, so feel free to cross fingers/eyes/toes for me. I’m skeeered. But I’m sure I’ll survive and have at least ten highly embarrassing stories to tell you guys when it’s all said and done. We’ve even been prepping Clara for the flight. More on that here. What did you guys do this weekend? Any ORBing or lighting bid-ness in the hiz-ouse?

 
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