Chandelier Installation, WD40, and Plaster Color Selection

Oooh...our postal carrier brought us a box yesterday. What could be inside?


The dining room chandelier. Yay! In my hand I'm holding up one of the arms from the chandelier beside one of the sconces we installed a few weeks ago. We couldn't find a patent date on the chandelier, but it's obvious they are from the same line. The sconces themselves are marked 1926. The chandelier came from New Jersey, the sconces from, I think, a seller in Michigan. But we joked around that these were probably the original fixtures to our house come home again.


Unfortunately, the chandelier is not brass and copper, as the seller said. It's brass with copper-painted accents and steel. Know how we know it's steel? Because of all the rust. When we unwrapped it, we were surprised to see tons of rust flecks everywhere. When Ted disassembled the chandelier to rewire it, we saw why.

The base is made of painted steel, and it looks like water had at some point leaked from whatever ceiling it was hanging from, through the fixture, and collected in the base.

I grumbled a bit to the seller who did, to be fair, offer to take the chandelier back for a refund. But it matched our sconces exactly, so I wasn't willing to give it up. However, if a seller says it's made of brass, I don't want to find out it's really rusty steel.

We did what we could to halt the rust. Big fans of WD40, we soaked rags with it and wiped out all the interior rust, being careful not to let it flow onto the exterior finish. It worked pretty well.

We ended up wiping down most of the interior screws and anchoring bits as well, ridding them of rust and adding a protective layer of WD40.

Then Ted replaced the blah and boring lamp cord with bronze cloth-covered cord, at least for the cords that were showing. I think you can see a bit of it in the photo below. The rest of the cord had been replaced recently, and was in good shape, so we left it.

Then we hung it up, stuck in some bulbs, and went outside to admire it from the street. (You can see detailed pics of the chandelier at this previous post.)

The kittens seemed pretty impressed, too.

Or maybe it was just the lady bug crawling across it.

We're nearly done with what we plan for the dining room. Mom and I went to The Home Depot today to pick up some Behr Venetian Plaster for the walls. I'll do a how-to on Venetian Plaster next week, but here's a sneak peek at the color.

Yummy, no?