Light bulbs

As I was switching out the incandescent chandelier bulbs in the living room sconces with CFL's last night I discovered that the bulbs that were in the fixture were 50 or 60 watts each (I couldn't quite make out the tiny writing on the tiny metal base of each bulb). I'm not positive if the light fixture itself can handle that kind of wattage or not, but one thing was painfully clear, the chandelier shades that covered the light bulbs could not handle those bulbs. The plastic underneath the decorative fabric on the shades, which appeared to be there to give the shades their shape, was cracked and then proceeded to crack even more when I touched the shades in order to remove them to swap out the bulbs and then put them back on with the new bulbs in place.

It really surprises me how bright of bulbs were being used in this house previously, especially since the house is fairly bright in the daytime without any lights on. Now I am left to find new shades to replace the existing shades on the wall sconces in the living room. That is unless I can figure out some way to repair the existing shades. I am also left knowing that I really need to swap out all of the incandescent bulbs in the house as quickly as I can for fear that the bulbs might damage more of the fixtures or cause an even bigger problem.

Upon closer inspection of the chandelier style shades that are on the wall sconces I found that there is no metal boning to help give the shades their structure, sadly that means that there is no easy salvaging of these 4 shades. It looks like that is one more thing to add to the ever growing shopping list for the new house. So far the closest I can find online are 6" Ekas shades at Ikea and are $7.00 each, that means $28 to replace something that probably shouldn't have needed replacing if it were used properly. Oh well, at least for now we haven't stumbled upon any big and expensive problems that we were unaware of.