I Am Not A Fan Of Ceiling Fans

I am not a fan of ceiling fans. 

I never have been. They don't appeal to me in the least. The very worst is laying in the bedroom looking straight up at a ceiling fan rotating over the bed. It makes me nauseous. Even a ceiling fan out of the corner of my eye, in my peripheral vision, can make my stomach upset.

The only reason I agreed to a ceiling fan in my She Shed is because it's mostly positioned up over my shoulder, out of my line of sight. With the 14 ft tall ceiling, we need to push the hot air down and need circulation in the room. I know that. When we created the She Shed we added this 56-in industrial ceiling fan. It works quite well and has a rheostat type wall switch that you can run it on any speed. On the highest speed it is zooming like an airplane ready to take off! We usually kept it down as low as possible just to move the air around. But, it only goes in one direction and it pushes the air straight down on us. The outer walls still feel cold, and the corners are really chilly. Not bad in the summer, but in the winter months I just don't like the feeling of the air pushing down. Also, the industrial ceiling fan does not have a light on it.

Steve suggested we put a household type ceiling fan up there with a remote control. Then we can reverse the direction, control the speed, and have the light on dimmer to create whatever level we want of illumination. So he hopped up on his ladder and disabled the one that was up there. We will list that on Marketplace and sell it because it's a perfectly good fan. It just doesn't have all of the features that we wanted like the household one does.

It has only 3 blades and was unobtrusive up there, kinda out of sight, outta mind for me.

We ran up to the big box home improvement store Menards in Marinette. There they had this 52-in fan, which is a little smaller. But it did have the reversibility and also the light kit with the dimmer and the remote control.

Hop skip jump like a bunny, here's my Steveio assembling the new fan and putting it up. I read the directions and handed him the parts, while he took care of the wiring and the mounting brackets.  He just loves fiddling with stuff and getting it set right. 

Soon he had it all together and tested, turned the power back on, and it works just fine. Now we can control the amount of circulation in the room much easier with the touch of a remote.  It will push the warm air down along the walls and take care of excess condensation on the tall french doors and windows too.  We noticed a drastic improvement in just an hour of use.  The room feels more "even temp" with the better circulation. 

I do want to add this stained glass lamp shade to the bottom of the fixture to match the other stained glass lights in the She Shed and the rest of the house. The only problem is the threaded rod that came with the kit is only long enough for the white shade that was included. Steve put the white one up for now, but as soon as we get back to a hardware store he can get the longer threaded rod. 

We had added stained glass shades like this to the ceiling fans in the house in Chilton and it makes them at least tolerable in appearance to me. Even though I still don't like the blades moving if I can help it.  Now I can walk in the room and hit the button on the remote to turn it off when Steve isn't looking.  LOL

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While we were at Menards, we took the time to pick up an extra gallon of paint to work on the newest antique door that he found on Marketplace. It's written about in the blog prior to this.  He is sanding it first, and then I will paint it before installing it on the laundry room/ half bath doorway. 

At the same time we had another thought in mind. Since we bought this house three and a half years ago we really hadn't painted any of the rooms (other than a couple crazy deep mauve accent walls), and we did paint the bedroom when we redid the ceiling. 

The rest of the walls in the entire house are almost a pinkish beige hue called Bermuda Sand. We are considering maybe lightning brightening and changing the tone so we grabbed a bunch of paint chips to decide what we're going to do. Since all of the trim and doors are painted in the String of Pearls color we need to find something that coordinates without looking too pinky. So here were some of our choices:

We will think about that a bit and make a decision later. But we can paint room by room, wall by wall, and take our time. I do enjoy painting and it can be a winter time project. Just doing a little bit at a time. 

On our run up to Marinette and back was an absolutely beautiful day with vivid blue sky. It has stayed cold enough here that the snow is still clinging to the branches of the trees everywhere. 

The wind chills were in the 10 degree range, 

but falling lower by the weekend.

I know in the Eastern states they are getting hammered this weekend with four or five feet of snow. Right now we just have an inch or two on the ground and that is fine. It brightens everything up and looks so clean, Much better than the dull browns and greys after the autumn leaves came off the trees. 

We are staying in this weekend and not doing much of anything. I may start on this next quilt project which is for my friend Vicky. It's in memory of her mom, it's a quilt kit that her mom had bought and never got around to working on. It will be a wall hanging.  I will do the cutting, piecing and quilting while she will do the stitching around the appliqued birds and the little branches they are sitting on.

When we work on it, Vicky has decided she would like all four birds going in the same direction. On this sample photo from the kit, it looks like they are crooked not placed properly. I hope our version will look better than this! 

So that's it for a comfy Snuggly Saturday morning. I am fighting off a little bit of sinus and a sore throat. Not enough to be really sick, but enough to not want to go anywhere either. Good excuse to stay home and play with my She-Shed stuff.

White and Bright! Painting My She Shed

These blog posts are catching up on the past two months of work on the She Shed.

Three days had passed for the fresh plaster to cure. Now it was time to get started with the painting!

On one of our little forays up to the ReStore in Marinette, we happened upon a big 5 gallon bucket of really nice all white Sherwin-Williams contractor grade paint. There was about four gallons left in the bucket. We got the entire bucket for $30, which about what it would cost for 1 gallon of good paint.

I looked up this particular brand and type of paint up online and it's $77 a gallon! That makes this bucket worth about $300.00!  I only wanted bright white, no other colors.  My goal is to re-create the feeling of the front porch at our last home in Chilton. 

Our old front porch - 

Light Bright and Airy. 

I eagerly got out my paint roller, extended telescoping handle, and my favorite paint tray. I like this tray because I can take a break, and snap the lid on with the roller in place, and it keeps the paint fresh without skinning over or drying out.

We started with a coat of primer that soaked right in. It was almost dry on the first wall by the time I finished the last wall.

Steve does not enjoy painting, to say the least. But he did go around on the ladder and do the cutting in for me ahead of my rolling. He takes a wide brush and makes sure he gets into every corner and then about the first four to five inches down each wall and across each ceiling surface.

Because we don't have trim up yet, we can run the paint right up to the edges of the plaster around the windows. The trim will come later.

I put on my MP3 player of soft Celtic music and set myself to work... I do enjoy painting. A lot. And now that the new paints don't have strong fumes like they used to, this one is especially nice because it is no VOC. It doesn't bother my lungs and I can paint away till my heart's content.

The room transformed itself from the raw plaster over to a beautiful white solid surface with primer and two coats of paint.  We will wrap the beam and cover the entryway ceiling later with tongue and groove cardsiding.

It gave us a really good feeling to see the room become more and more finished with each stroke of the roller.  At the very end of the second coat on the ceiling, we had to run and buy one more single gallon of that paint! The guy at the Sherwin Williams store said the retail price was $79 for the single gallon. ACK! Since I had the matching contractor bucket, he dropped it down to the contractor price. $37.00!  That was more than the entire big bucket I had gotten from the ReStore, but I needed that last gallon to finish the job.  Oh well. 

Here I am doing the very last section of the ceiling.

Once the paint was dry, we could start attaching all of the light fixtures and putting on the covers to the switches and wall outlets.

This was really exciting, because now we could see how our light fixtures were going to look. I had mentioned in a couple blogs back about finding these wall sconces at the local hardware store on clearance. They were in three different finishes, one was black, one was rubbed oil bronze, and one was silver. I had spray-painted them all white. Then I had found a lady on Facebook marketplace selling matching stained glass lamp shades that match the rest of the fixtures in my house.

We put them up as Steve connected all of the wires, and then I to had to decide if we wanted the lights to aim up or aim down??

Two sconces are on each side of the french windows facing east, and a third one near the entrance from the big garage.  Here I tried aiming them up. (Finnegan on guard dog duty now that the windows in the doors are low enough for him to see out of).

I finally I put pictures of both ways on my Facebook page and asked my friends to help me vote. The majority voted "down" so the majority rules. But we can change them at any time if we want, because there's only one central nut holding the fixture on to the wall.

Steve had figured out a way of how to mount my two articulating arm lights over the working area for my 12 foot quilting frame. He adapted them so they could be wired directly and mounted tight to the wall. I can swing them out or in any direction to use them but push them back out of the way when not in use.

We added LED flood lights to brightly illuminate the area.

Next thing, Steve mounted the ceiling fan up high on the sloped 11 foot tall ceiling. It's a commercial version of a fan, and goes very fast with speeds of one to five. A number five feels like you are standing underneath a helicopter! But it's very whisper-quiet down on setting one or two which is where we will keep it. Even on speed one it moves the air quite extensively around the room.

It was a really good bargain on sale for only $45. I like it because it's white and simple and plain and doesn't draw a lot of attention to it up there on the ceiling. I think big clunky ceiling fans with dark blades bother my eyes and give me a vertigo feeling. So this one will do the trick.

With all of the light fixtures in place and operational, we can dim down the wall sconces or brighten them up as we wish. Steve has 3 switches to operate all three at one time. He placed them by the entry door, the kitchen door and in the middle of the south wall in the room.

He also got all of the wiring for the exterior lights and exterior outlet functioning as well.

Steve got the TV mounted up on the bracket and hooked up to the antenna and power line, as well as adding his soundbar. We took the bigger TV from the living room to keep as our main TV down here. We shuffled some other smaller TVs around to take it's place in the living room.

Steve figures he will be spending more time down here in the she shed than up in our living room. I think he is right. Haha!

He got the TV done just in time for the Packer game that afternoon. He set up his lawn chair in front of it and made himself at home. A beer, a bowl of chips and some salsa. He was all set.

Granddaughter Claire decided to try it out

 and watch some cartoons 

from the comfort on top of 

Grandma in the lawn chair! 

I think my next blog will be about the process in which we leveled the cement floor and added the grey plank flooring.

Stay tuned!