Tiffany's, but no little blue box

Check one off the list - our office has a beautiful new light fixture. Bonus points because the wiring up there wasn't all that scary (old houses always make the smallest upgrades into a suspenseful thriller, because there's no telling what's waiting - especially with electrical work). Step one was to find a lamp that we liked. It would be easy, we thought, to replace the ugly generic lamp that was there when we bought the house. I realized I never took a picture of the old fixture, even looking way back in the blog archives. Well here it is, sitting on our table, ready to be retired:

After at least 20 minutes of searching at stores like Crate and Barrel, West Elm, Pier 1, and World Market, we realized it might be a difficult thing to find. We wanted the bulbs to be covered and we wanted something interesting that also actually produced light (as opposed to mood lighting that wouldn't actually illuminate the room). Fortunately we went back to the basics and found one semi-flushmount light at Lowes. D remarked: "that looks kinda nice," I agreed, and 5 minutes later it was ordered for local in-store pick-up. We were all in favor of quick, decisive action.

The next afternoon, we picked up the fixture and by that night, had it installed. No sense in letting it sit around.

The instructions were actually so misleading that we quickly went off-book (seriously, it had the step about putting the decorative plate on before even attaching the base to the ceiling, it made no sense. Step one was actually tricky - threading all 3 wires through the tube and the nut was a very tight fit.

The other problem we ran into was that the electric box on the ceiling was a circle that was plastered in place and protruded a little, which stopped us from getting the new fixture flush with the ceiling. The decorative nuts did not allow us to tighten it enough even to get it to stop wiggling. D ingeniously added an extra nut to let us tighten the fixture. You can see it's still not totally flush to the ceiling, but it is flush to the electrical box and is much more stable now. Of course we notice it, but no one else ever will. And probably in a few days we won't either. It looks much better now - at first D used a rusty nut but when we realized how visible it was, he found one in a matching brushed nickel finish.

Fortunately those were our only complications. The wires, mercifully, were not too surprising. Old and cloth-covered, yes, but at least there was a white and a black and everything went back into place. And so without further ado, here is the newest addition to our home decor - the Portfolio 13-in Tiffany Style lamp:

And thankfully, it does what it was supposed to and fit the new LED bulbs wonderfully. Here it is illuminated:

We love it and our only regrets are that we don't use the room more often and that we didn't replace it sooner. Might be time to replace the kitchen lamp as well. It's ok, but now it seems awfully boring.

Random question before I sign off - we're shopping around for faucets for the bathroom and wondered if anyone knew what brands are good and what to steer clear of. We were mostly looking at Kohler and Moen because we thought they were well-made. Delta has some pretty ones, but we've never used them before. Suggestions? The only thing we do know from the bathroom remodel was to buy them from fancier places, because the versions sold by Lowes and Home Depot tend to use cheaper plastic parts. Someone recommended faucet.com because we don't have anywhere convenient to shop in person.