I had been ogling this pendant lamp over at West Elm since I got my latest catalog. CB2 has a similar one for about $50 more which I was resigning myself to until West Elm decided to do us all a favor and shave off some dollah bills from the price tag. Plus the West Elm lamp is a little cuter.

I really really wanted it for our dining room, but was discouraged when I saw that it was on backorder until April on the website. So I called our local West Elm to see if they had it in stock, and what do you know?! They did! So they held it for me until I could get my booty down there Friday afternoon to pick it up.

Now usually I wouldn’t go and blow $150 on a new lamp for my dining room when the one that came with the house was perfectly good. But I was struck by some genius lightning last week and realized I had just enough credit card points to cash in towards a West Elm giftcard towards the lamp. SCORE! I wound up paying around $16 total since I had to pay 9% sales tax and buy a new 150 watt lightbulb.

I ran into two problems while trying to install the lamp. First of all, the pendant kit was outfitted with a three pronged plug to go into an outlet, but I wanted it to be hardwired to the ceiling like the old lamp. Easy enough – I just cut off the cord at the length that I wanted and found the three separate wires – green (ground), black (positive), and white (negative). Next I had a large-ish hole in the ceiling from the old lamp with no base plate on the new lamp to cover it with. So I had to use the base plate from the old lamp which meant I needed to wait for Matt to get home and bend some chain for me to acquire it.

All in all, with Matt’s help and my knack for guessing the polarity of ancient house wires, we got the thing installed in about an hour with no electrocution or breaking the dining room table on which we were both kneeling.

Before:

After:

In the annals of items we have purchased with our credit card points, I tend to think my pendant lamp is far superior to Matt’s gas grill which has never burned a very hot flame. Which is really fine. We could grill burgers on Matt’s shirtless body. OH SNAP!

This entry was posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 3:21 pm and is filed under Home Ownership, Stuff I Love. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.