Dining Room Update: Goodbye Brass Ceiling Fan

We have been hitting the projects pretty hard over here! We're working on a new retaining wall to cover up our tire one (yes, we have an ugly tire retaining wall in our yard. ugh!) and on Monday we are getting a new door and windows in our basement. Be on the lookout for posts about those coming soon!

I also have been planning an overhaul of our dining room. New paint on the ceiling and walls is in order, because it is the same TAN that is the bane our house. Not only is it all tan, but there are two different shades of tan on the ceiling... it's GOT TO GO!! I'm hoping a white ceiling will brighten this room considerably, because you'll see that despite the big window it's a little dark. I think I've decided on a Requisite Grey for the walls. It's a nice greige that will look okay from the tan living room and yellow kitchen!

{  Requisite Grey  }

 I've also been at a loss as to what to do about a dining room light. When we moved in there was a ceiling fan with three upward facing tulip bulb things (I am not one for technical terms, I suppose), and that's what we've left there up to this point. It's always kind of bothered me though. I dream of having a really cool chandelier light fixture, but the practical side of me really says we should keep the fan there because it's the only one on this side of the house.

{  The existing ceiling fan  }

I have kept my eyes peeled for a cool dining room ceiling fan, but they definitely don't exist in my price range, and I'm not sure they exist out of my price range either... ceiling fans are just functional and pretty lame.

SO I decided to try my best at updating one that we already had in the house. My goal was to create a more interesting light for it and let the fan blades blend into the ceiling color, which will soon be white instead of this awful tan. We had a different fan in my "boudoir" that already had white blades, and four bulb sockets, so I decided to update it for the dining room instead.

It was a lovely brass, but brass is NOT what I was envisioning. Here is a before shot of what I was working with. Tulip glass went over the bulbs and cast all kinds of weird light around the room when the lights were on.

We took the whole fan down and I bought a can of oil-rubbed bronze spray paint. I saw somewhere (HGTV) that you can rough up the surface of brass by soaking it in a concentrated salt water solution and I started trying that on one of the blade pieces, but I got impatient and started sanding it down instead.  

I used a 120 grit sand paper I think... It was a spare piece in the garage that wasn't labelled on the back (come on sandpaper company, you should ALWAYS label your sandpaper!). I would recommend going with a finer grit than that, 220 probably. I didn't do a perfect job sanding it, but just roughed it up In hopes that the paint would stick. Since it's a ceiling fan, there's not much that is going to come in to contact with it to scratch it so this worked well, but I don't think it would be very good for something that gets touched a lot.

I sprayed it all down with a few thin coats of the paint. I was debating what to do about the plastic sockets, because they are going to show and I really wanted them painted, but I also don't want to start a fire. The paint says it's good on surface up to 200 degrees, and a touch test told us that the sockets probably don't get that hot (but this is probably not a reliable source!... I'll let you know if my house burns down from it.)

Instead of putting regular bulbs and the glass shades back up I opted for edison bulbs instead to give it a more modern feel.

Eventually, I'll do a shot of the whole dining room, but the table (which I am also almost done refinishing!) is a mess right now, so it's not going to be featured yet ;)

I'm not sure how I like it yet. Ideally, I wanted something that made more of a statement. I don't think this is quite it, but around here we generally rate things on improvement and I definitely like it more than what was there before! For an approximate $20 update I think it was well worth it. We may continue playing with it and if I come up with something better, I will be sure to post an update. What do you think about it?!