Replace Room Light with Fan

Several months ago Karrie and I went to an auction which specialized in home building materials. We weren't planning on getting a whole lot, but ended up getting quite a bit of stuff for our house. I'll have to write a separate blog post about that later, but first I want to show one thing we did get, which was a new ceiling fan.  This is the fan we've had in her bedroom for about a year.  It had a small motor and was loud when it was on.

It was actually a small ceiling fan that was originally located in one of the spare bedrooms.  It used to be all white but I painted it this brown color and then i flipped the blades over so now the white blades are facing the ceiling.  I tried several times to make a different light shade but nothing seemed to look good in our room.

Here's the fan we got at the auction. Karrie won the bidding on it for something like $30 or $35.  It was a nice large 52 inch fan with a big electric motor and light.  I liked the larger electric motor because that meant it should be quieter when it was running.  Plus the blades were a lot larger which meant that it could be run at lower speeds.

It's kind of difficult to explain but my plan was to make a three room switch of 2 fans and 2 lights.  I would put the new fan in our room, move the old fan to the spare bedroom, and move that light to Karrie's arts and craft room. The ceiling light that was in that room was very old get thrown out.

So the first step was to remove the ceiling fan from our bedroom.  As you can see it was a jumble of wires, but not too complicated.  The hard part was attaching the fan bracket and feeding the wires through the center pipe.  I took some pictures in case I forgot how it was all wired together.

After I removed the old fan I was left with just this, a metal bracket and a positive and neutral white and black wires.

Then i took all the new fan pieces out of the box.  It was a little more complicated than I thought.  I had to attach each bracket to the fan housing and then attach each blade to the bracket.  The light shade then attached to the bottom and wires had to be run to the light bulbs.

I figured that it would be easier though before I did all that, to try and attach the fan housing to the ceiling first.  That way I wouldn't have to be lifting the weight of the entire fan, just the main fan motor.  This was definitely the most difficult part, having to attach the bracket and then wire everything together before permanently attaching the motor to the ceiling bracket.  All while holding this thing above your head with 1 hand.

Then I went into the spare bedroom and removed the old ceiling light.  Here's the old light that we got rid of.

And this was the newer light that we would be moving to Karrie's arts and crafts room.  This job was much easier and much lighter.  

All I had to do was connect white to white and black to black.

And i didn't have to do it one-handed, the fixture was light enough to be held up by the wires as i worked.

The last step was to attach the old fan in place of where I moved the ceiling light.  This too was a little bit difficult because of the weight of the fan.  It gets heavy when you're holding your arms up above your head for 10 minutes while trying to twist together some wires.  But finally I got everything attached and in place.

Here's what the new fan and light looks like in our bedroom. I thought the 52" fan blades would be too large but it wasn't, it's perfect for our bedroom.  Charlie doesn't seem to mind either and the motor is very quiet at low or medium speed.