Let there be LIGHT!!!

My marathon dining room makeover is finally coming to an end.  There are still some bits and pieces to finish off, followed by putting everything back in place, but all the heavy duty 'up-the-ladder' stuff is complete.

I can't do a reveal for the whole room yet, but I can show off the result of almost 4 weeks of hard work, transforming the chandelier.

Before I started it looked like this....

I had to strip all of the strings of crystals off, along with the only other bits which I could remove.

Candle cup holders, washed and drying.

Which left this.... horribly reminiscent of a large, black spider, especially when viewed from below! 

I had to carefully clean every part of it with a solution of Isopropyl Alcohol to remove 12 years of dust and grime, before giving it two coats of Gesso.

It took three weeks to string each individual crystal and prism onto silver connector rings....

.... a finger-numbing task which I only completed this week.

In the meantime I'd been painting the chandelier, with 2 coats of 9 different colours of pearlised paint.

If you ever feel the yen to do something similar, I have some really good advice for you.

Just. Don't.

Trust me, it's a nightmare.  There are close to 800 crystals, each of which has had two connecting rings painstakingly threaded through the holes to make individual strings.  The initial novelty of working with the lovely coloured glass crystals quickly wore off, as each jump ring connector had to be prised open with a blunt knife, to allow the end to slip into the holes.  This was, as our little Gigglefidget would say "a little bit tricky" and I endured many puncture wounds on various fingers in the process.

Of course, the inevitable mistakes of occasionally getting a colour out of sequence meant unstringing the incorrect crystals, which was even more difficult than stringing them.

Between spells of crystal stringing, painting the chandelier in situ entailed hours up a ladder, wielding a tiny paintbrush to pick out details.

So, take my advice and shell out for a new one.  You'll thank me in the long run.

Except of course, an off-the-shelf chandelier, at a cost of several hundred pounds, would not be completely unique.  So I can confidently assert that we have the only one in the world which looks like this.....

So despite all the blood, sweat and tears, I'm deliriously pleased with it and our previously bland, boring, uninspiring dining room is becoming a space which makes my heart sing.