Our Bedroom, Phase 1

I probably shouldn’t even say Phase 1, because it’s not like it’s actually been planned out. Instead, it started with the shower drain leak that caused a horrid-looking ceiling stain in the family room, which STRONGLY encouraged the start of our bathroom renovation (FINALLY!). And then led to the old shower being removed, one side of the wall between the bathroom and bedroom being exposed and has the bedroom light switches on it, and VOILA! The ceiling fan over my bed gets installed because it makes no sense not to.

This was by no means easy. Apparently, the attic over our bedroom— which i thought was fairly wide open from the attic access— was cramped, confusing, and required climbing through a fairly tiny tunnel to get access. Thank goodness my oldest daughter is so incredibly capable and willing to help with home projects.

We located the prime spot for the ceiling fan in our bedroom and inserted a foot-long metal shaft into the ceiling to allow us to locate the spot in the attic space. We sent our oldest up into the attic space with instructions, a cordless driver, and the screws needed to fixate the ceiling fan support and electrical box. She located the wire inserted run from the switch box into the ceiling and pulled it into the position where the fan would be located, while yelling to Chad how much she needed while he was on the phone with me pushing the wire up through the access. Sweet!

My oldest daughter and I could now communicate by pushing and wiggling on the metal rod— and don’t think we didn’t take that opportunity to be dumb! LOL. Once the hole and joist locations were confirmed, Chad placed the fan electrical box on the ceiling and traced around it. He cut it with a saw-zaw, handed up the ceiling fan’s support and woo hoo!! she placed the box in the right spot and inserted the screws into the supporting brackets. Once she inserted the wire through to the bedroom, she was done!

Chad did the job of assembling and wiring the ceiling fan itself while I worked. We still had to hood everything up to electricity, which turned out to be the real bane of this project. Both light switches currently in the bedroom electrical switch bank were three-way switches. This meant that we had to locate the home current to jump from— which took more effort than anticipated.

There was a lot of trial and error— multiple three-way switches give anyone a headache.