Let There Be Lights

We’ve lived much of the past few months as if our entire physical lives were covered by one big warranty that expired on Memorial Day.

I had to replace my Water-Pik, the tires on my car, and the blinds on multiple windows. We have a new water softener – a necessity in a place that gets its water filtered through a thousand feet of limestone bedrock – and all of the plumbing in the upstairs bathroom has been flushed out. I’ve put in four showerheads since the spring semester ended, though the latest one seems to be working just fine. I managed to fix the dehumidifier in the basement, much to my surprise, and Kim fixed both of the toilets we own. In October our microwave died a noisy but mercifully abrupt and self-contained death and now we have a new one that is deeper but about half as tall so we can cook things that are wide but not high. Last week the control panel on the oven decided not to let us turn the oven off for a while but we’ve known that it was possessed since we bought it – it would periodically emit loud beeping noises and briefly show 666 on the clock face before returning to the usual display and I’m genuinely not making that up – so it really didn’t surprise us much. The appliance guy is coming to fix that next week, though whether he brings screwdrivers or a crucifix will be interesting. Could be both! Why not both. A book I purchased turned out to have printing errors that repeated some paragraphs and deleted others and while Amazon (politely) told me to pound sand the publisher was more reasonable about it and I may have a replacement next week if all goes well.

The cat is still in good shape, as far as we know, and that has to count for something.

My goal when it comes to home repair projects is always to pay other people to fix things, as I have a difficult and unfriendly relationship with the physical world and I dislike those projects with a consuming and deeply immature passion. I know other people enjoy such things but to me they’re just dentistry – probably good for me in the long run, but unpleasant experiences nonetheless. Plus, if I pay someone with actual expertise there is always the possibility that they will be done correctly.

This is often more of an aspiration than a practical reality, though, so all too often I have to put on my Homeowner Hat and try to figure out what exactly the instructions for this project mean in real terms and how I can actually carry them out without injuring either myself, the people around me, or the thing I’m trying to fix. More and more these days I wish I were more of a drinking man, but so it goes.

Last weekend I ended up doing not one but actually two of these home repair projects, both of which involved putting in new light fixtures. Getting this done was, as always in these cases, problematic, but so far nothing has burned down and I’m going to call that a win on points.

On Saturday I replaced the light fixture on the outside of the garage.

We’d had a friend install one when he put in the garage door openers a quarter century ago, and it served us well for a long time. But the plastic housings had gotten so old and brittle that when I went to put up the usual string of overhead lights that we do every summer – tying one end to the side of the garage, running it over to the awning over the back door and then back to that light fixture – one of the two swiveling light housings just snapped off. The other one still worked, so I figured I’d get to it after I took the overhead lights down, and that finally happened a few weeks ago.

The new fixture is actually pretty nice. It’s got two LED paddles that never need to be replaced and which you can rotate to point pretty much any direction you want, which is all I was looking for, and it installed with only the standard minimum amount of confusion and profanity. It works pretty well and it’s really bright.

What I didn’t realize was there is also an LED ring around the base – a strip about half an inch wide running around a circular base that has a diameter of about eight inches – that lights up at dusk and then stays on the entire night until the sun is well and truly risen. It’s a low, warm light so it’s not like we’re landing planes here, but I’m still not convinced it’s something I want.

Unfortunately, this is the default setting and the only way to change that is to download an app onto my phone, set up an account, and then use that to control the light. I need to log into my garage light, in other words. This is not the future I wanted.

I haven’t decided whether I want to go through that or just live with the nightlight feature. We’ll see.

On Sunday I replaced the ceiling fan fixture in our bedroom.

The old one had been there for long enough that it was starting to thump and whinge whenever we turned it on, and we could never quite be bothered to find matching light bulbs for it so it had four differently-shaped bulbs in it as well as one empty socket that pointed directly at our heads in bed and gave us too much glare so we took the bulb out. Plus the paddles were very long, and every time I forgot they were there and tried to put on a shirt I’d end up punching one. The new fixture looks like a roomba. It’s got an LED ring around it that's maybe three fingers wide, and in the center it has some short but high-velocity fan blades that put out a fair amount of wind.

This project took slightly more than the standard amount of confusion and profanity to install, as well as an emergency trip to the hardware store to deal with the fact that the ceiling box was half an inch too small for the fixture so I needed to get an adapter.

The light has a lot of different settings. You can vary the brightness, from Expensive Restaurant Dim to Airport Runway Bright. You can also shade it from cool to warm. And, it turns out, it has a Disco Night setting where the light will cycle through colors ranging from blood red to deep blue to vibrantly green, with occasional stops at white light just long enough to keep your eyes from adjusting to the darker colors.

We found out about the Disco Night setting by accident – there’s a button on the little remote that came with the light and Kim was playing around with it to see what would happen – and now we’re stuck with it. We cannot turn it off. The remote will no longer talk to the light for some reason, and there are no controls whatsoever on the light itself. The only way you can control it, other than turning it off completely with the wall switch, is through the remote.

I suppose I should be grateful that it’s not an app.

So right now that is unusable and we’re waiting to find a time where their service center is open and we are not actually at work.

At some point we will just get oil lanterns and be done with it.