Thursday, January 3, 2013

Exterior Lighting.

My mom is engaged to a pretty awesome guy, Don, who happens to be excellent in the whole building/home maintenance department. The guy has a degree as an architect and his day job involves lots of big, different projects (construction related) all over the state. A while back, I just generally asked him how hard it would be to add some hard wired lighting to the back side of our house. We do not have a light on the back of our house and it's the door we use the most (actually, the only door we use unless someone comes to the front door). At night this is not the best thing, especially for guests who don't know their way around our yard/driveway. In telling Don about what I was thinking, including how it would be nice to have a light inside our doorway as well, he volunteered to assist. Awesome!

It's been over a year since he volunteered to help out, mostly because the man is real busy, and because maybe I forgot all about it. My mom recently said that he would have time coming up to help us do the wiring and whatnot and told us it would be a good time to start looking at light fixtures. So, I've been looking...

Ideally, I would love to find exterior lights that are more 'time period appropriate' for my house, which was built in 1951. Well, it's not really that easy. We replaced the light fixture out front a couple years ago because the old one was shiny brass gone rusty and it looked horrible. We looked and looked and eventually just settled on a generic one that we could live with...


We're at a point in our home ownership where the exterior could use a lot of love. Sand blasting rains from the summer removed a decent amount of paint from the siding and even more peeling and bubbling, revealing an obnoxiously bright aqua/sea foam (and in some spots RED?) color peaking out. And most of our windows, that I'm guessing are from the 70's or 80's, no longer stay open and leak a lot of cold air all winter long. Not to mention the nice hail dents in our shutters that have been there since before we bought the house... So, all that needs to be addressed/tackled soonish.



Back to exterior lighting... A lot of what I can find, the pictures are of a full side of the exterior of a home, but it's not a high res image, so I can't zoom WAY in and examine. Insert Crestview Doors. Not only do they have some AMAZING doors that I want and am going to try my hardest to talk my husband into, they have photos of them in (on?) homes with lighting! YES! The one piece of my house that I wish was original, besides the bathroom, is the front door. We have a gross standard door with the half circle window up top with gross shiny brass and weird glass. No thank you. The Crestview Doors are so fantastic and there are so many styles... They have a great flickr slide show of doors installed and you can see a lot of the exterior lighting. And I'm seeing a lot of one thing.

Home Depot just happens to have some similar to one of the styles I kept seeing...


1. Eglo Riga Wall-Mount 2-Light Sylinder Outdoor Stainless-Steel Light Fixture | $47.97
2. Eglo Riga Wall-Mount Cylinder Outdoor Stainless-Steel Light Fixture | Smaller version of 1 | $37.97

3. Progress Lighting 2-Light Black Wall Lantern | Available in other colors | $120.06
4. Progress Lighting Black 1-Light Wall Lantern | Smaller version of 3 | Available in other colors | $59.13

Home Depot has a few more similar styles. They have so many light fixtures, my brain starts to turn into mush though. The larger, 2-light fixtures would be for the front of the house and the smaller, 1-light fixture would be for the back. I'm leaning towards that first set and I already have Bill on board. I'm just slightly afraid that it will look too 'industrial' for our neighborhood... As usual, I'm probably over thinking though.

Now I just need to get Bill on board with a Crestview Door...

Any moderately priced mid century style appropriate fixture suggestions are more than welcome!

Update when everything is purchased and installed.

And for amusement for the time being... here is what it could look (with the aid of a quick, poor photoshop session) with the new light and door.

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