Wednesday, August 20, 2014

To Swag, or Not to Swag: Chandelier Placement

I've been working on turning our downstairs playroom into the guest bedroom. It's been a slow process to say the least, but I think it's finally wrapping up. I've always had trouble with this room because the layout is so AWKWARD and it's completely tiled (yuck/cold). If you remember this post, I've even considered knocking out walls to make it a better working space. As a last resort, we tried squeezing the bed in the window niche* and to our surprise it actually fit! Granted there's virtually no space to climb in or out of the bed on the side, it still fits and allows some floor space to work with in the rest of the room.

My next dilemma was the light fixture. Originally the room must not have had a bathroom, and the light fixture was probably centered. Now it's so close to the bathroom door that I was afraid if I switched out fixtures, anything but a flush ceiling mount would get hit. But the room was so dark, and I hate dark rooms! My solution:a chandelier. My problem: where to swag said chandelier?


When hanging chandeliers there's all kinds of rules to abide by: how high to hang from the floor, where to place them, how wide is the proper width for your room size, etc. The list is kind of overwhelming, and we didn't really want to spend a crazy amount of money or time on a guest room chandelier. I found this cheap inexpensive "crystal" [plastic] chandelier at Home Depot (I think I might partially dip it in white to modernize it a bit).
Once we took the old ceiling mount light fixture down, we realized there was an unusually large hole where the electrical box is (I swear, hanging light fixtures is always the biggest headache in our house). We had an old ceiling medallion leftover from my shop. I could never figure out why it didn't sell... it's gorgeous! But I'm glad it didn't. We had to spray paint it white, but afterwards it worked perfectly to cover the hole in the ceiling. It's huge though- I'm a little uncomfortable with how big it is, but boy is it pretty! If you want an instant touch of glamour, I'd seriously recommend adding a ceiling medallion.

Anyways, we chose to swag it centered on the bed, although I've seen some hang more towards the foot of the bed. I was afraid of head bumping, but I read you can get away with hanging chandeliers a little lower than normal over a bed. Even after all this work, I'm not so sure about the swag so I thought I'd open it up to you. What do you think? Does it look off-kiltered? I almost feel like it's going to look off centered no matter what because the room shape is not a perfect square. Should I just let it hang straight down from the ceiling or do you like the swag over the bed look?

 It's really hard to get an un-distorted picture of the whole room (without a wide-angle lens), so please excuse my diagonal photo. 


*Side note: This just goes to show how important staging can be... back when we had our house on the market, we didn't have a bed in this room. People didn't think of it as a legitimate bedroom because they didn't think a bed would actually fit. Here we prove not only can a bed fit, but a queen sized bed! I'm not sure why, but rooms always look smaller than they are without furniture- thus the importance of staging when you're trying to sell! Alright, I'm done. 

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