$12 worth of massive satisfaction

(First...I don't know why I can't orient these properly. On my computer, they orient correctly, but when I upload, they reorient themselves. My advice? Tip your head. Yes, I'm very technical, I know.)

Okay, here's the deal.

I love our house. It is truly home. I love the covered front porch, the hardwood floors, the woodwork, the front door, the yard, the light, the colors...lots of things.

But there are some other things, too. One of those things has been the light fixture in our upstairs bathroom. When I saw it the first time, I said, "Well, if we buy this place, that THING is lasting about 30 seconds before we replace it!" Ha. Six and a half years later, I hated it no less.

(For those of you who haven't seen it, or who forgot what it looks like, allow me to refresh your memory. One of those oak boards from the 70s or 80s that has three fat, round lightbulbs sticking out of brass "holders" resembling cut up tubes of toilet paper. Only ours was worse, because somebody along the way got the brilliant idea to paint it. They used some king of primer, got primer halfway up the brass in a haphazard way, and then obviously tired of the project, and left it like that. UGLY doesn't even come close to describing it. Hideous is a slightly better word, but still fails to capture my feelings about it. I posted a picture of it here, but it doesn't do any justice at all to the hideousness of the old fixture.)

But it is no more - HURRAHHHHHHHH!

At the rummage sale Tessa and I attended last week, we were on the way out the door, and there was The Perfect Light Fixture. It was labeled "$12 - works" and I scooped it up. It was missing mounting hardware (which lead to not one, but two, trips to the hardware store) but at last, it's up and it does, indeed, work. I posted two pictures of it. To you, it may look like standard issue. To me, it looks like the character of our house, the same finish as the other stuff in the bathroom, the same alabaster finish on the shades as on the rest of the house, and a style that's appealing to me.

It's the little things in life.

If $12 can buy this much satisfaction, well, the possibilities are endless. I'm even more smug that I supported a local organization, kept something out of a landfill, reduced packaging, and kept out of the cycle of production that has so many chemical by-products by buying something already in use. The fact that it was so cheap only makes me more smug than all that could hope to.

(Now you may be asking why we haven't replaced the light before, since it was such a source of dissatisfaction. To you, I can only say, "You must not live in an old house." There are lots of "odd" little things in our house that I'd like to change, and time and money and energy being what they are, some have waited a long time.)

I'm going to have a bubble bath tonight, and instead of staring up at that hideous old thing, I'll see the shiny new one. Ironically, I prefer to have my bubble baths by candle-light, but that's not the point - the fixture is right in my line of vision when I bathe.

(PS All of this is a very good distraction from my other, less pleasant thoughts. I have a therapist appointment tomorrow and discussing my surgery is my number one issue. It takes more than a bubble bath to get me down from that problem.)