my new awesome kitchen light!

i am planning a photo-tour of our new house. really. all the pictures are even on my computer already. it only took me what? almost three months since our move-in? yeah.

in the meantime, though, i wanted to share right quick my fabulous kitchen light fixture. see the house came with whatever standard fixtures the original owners settled for and awesome papa and i never liked the overhead lights in the dining room or living area, which was apparently supposed to be the formal dining area because it had the same exact fixture as the kitchen dining area. we promptly replaced it so that the lighting was adequate and suitable for our use of that space but we weren't in hurry to replace the fixture above our table.

i told awesome papa i wanted a faux-tiffany-pizza-joint style fixture in the kitchen dining area and he agreed that would work well.

fast forward two months after our move-in and awesome papa finally has the time to install our artscape window film on the tall, slim window near our front-door. we had this product before, in the sunroom of our old house, with great results. it's pretty, it still lets in some light, but offers near-complete privacy from the outside.

so, i picked that pretty magnolia faux-stained glass film and it looked great! the next night, awesome papa tells me he is about to undertake an art project and i gave him a quizzical look, thinking, at first, that he was completely joking. not that he's not very artistic, but i've never seen him make the time to do anything artistic.

he brings out the leftover film and tells me he wants to apply it to our ugly, boring dining room light fixture, mosaic-style. we both figured we had nothing to lose...if we hated it, well, we were going to replace it eventually, anyhow, so i agreed that was a good way to use the remaining film (even if had originally wanted to apply it to a piece of plexiglass and then hang it over our bathroom window, we really didn't have enough for as large an area to cover.)

so. i wasn't expecting to be wowed and without the light on, maybe it's not even that wow-inducing, but i like it and i am ever so grateful for my resourceful and creative hubby!

it took him nearly all night, but he basically took the fixture down and applied the window film the same way he would have to a window, using the application kit, to the inside of the dome. he found that the smaller the mosaic pieces were cut, the more likely they were to stay flat when removing air bubbles, which is important, since this stuff doesn't "stick" via an adhesive, but simple surface tension. once i learned that, i envisioned pieces of the film eventually sliding off into our dinner...but that's probably unlikely.

anyhow, there it is! we figured the broken stained glass effect would be pretty cool and i think we were right :)