Several weeks ago I mentioned my new chandelier. Sadly it’s been languishing near the door in the box, no time on my hands to put it together, also a little afraid. I had never assembled a chandelier, I’m not that handy at electricity – I do make it a habit to avoid it when possible.
We started out by making sure to read all the reviews, there are many and they are very helpful. I recommend checking out the reviews before you purchase any item, they are great tools for every buyer to be aware! But they additionally provide valuable helps and guides for the post purchase assembly. In other words I was aware of what I was getting into and I planned ahead.
We unpacked it! and laid everything out on the table to assess how difficult this was going to be. We pulled out the instruction sheet to do an inventory. First off be aware that this is manufactured in a foreign land, one where English is an obscure language for sure. The instructions were assembled very poorly, difficult to understand and Oh! Surprise! they were backwards, but I knew to expect this given the reviews I perused!
The pieces were all there, and there are a lot. You will find lots of tiny crystals – not well packed, in fact it’s like a big bag of little glass jewels. There was some chipping and some cracking, but nothing unusable. Fortunately they send a few extra’s and I had plenty to work with plus a few spares left over. So we plotted out our path and laid it all out.
First we had to attached all the crystals and as noted in the reviews, they are silver jewelry wires used, I tried to spray paint them in advance, I think that was a mess, so 50% of them have 50% of the brown paint on them, but it was barely noticeable – I think this is a smaller issue than others I encountered.
We also prepped for the anticipated “orange” plastic candle covers, and yes, they were “orange”. We painted them white with some krylon plastic paint – which worked great, and we (I) started to assemble. My biggest issue was how to prop and balance all the pieces while I was assembling so they didn’t bend or break. For this I re-used the box and the brace that was inside for shipping.
First, all the crystals are attached as I noted above. The tips of the chandelier are flanged and have a hole in them, you insert the crystal and thread the wire through and bend around. Fortunately I already have a few lighting fixtures around to see what the technique is for threading and securing the crystals, this was time consuming but really the easiest part. Once you have all the crystals on, you attach the wired arms and decorative arms to the base.
Again, I’ll say the biggest issue was balancing and propping up the thing, mid assembly and post assembly. We had to go back and tighten, adjust and retighten the arms to make sure it was all balanced. The electrical stage made us stall a week to make sure we did it right, but it ended up going pretty smoothly, especially since we were replacing an existing chandelier. You simply gather and wrap the white wires around one end of the electrical supply line, and gather and wrap the black wires to the other. The supply wire is already threaded through the pole and you don’t need to worry about which is which. Luckily the ceiling receptacle was ready for the fixture, the new one weighing comparable to the older one, if not lighter. We attached the wires (yes! don’t forget to turn off your power at the box, and test it with a tester to be sure!!), did some wire management and then screwed the caps on. We had to bend/adjust a couple of the candles to have them straight, but they were easy to fix and TA DA! We are thrilled with the results! What do you think?
The old versus New
Thanks for reading!
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- Beautiful Chandelier (bumblebriar.com)
