Guest Room Ceiling Fan: In Progress

Mike is working on the installation of a ceiling fan in the guest bedroom.  Electrical work is a complicated task in itself, but this time we added a new wrinkle - we wanted the fan and the light on the ceiling fan to be separate.  We learned from living with the fan in the master bedroom - both run off of one switch and it's frustrating on summer nights when we have the fan running and we have to turn the light on and off with the pull cord.  Entering the dark room and having to turn on the light from the middle all the time resulted in a lot bruised shins and of tripping over shoes.

This time Mike is installing the fan with a double switch that controls both the fan and light separately, which requires special wiring.  I think it will be well worth the effort  and we plan on doing it in the office as well and *hopefully* in our bedroom too before summer.  It's a good lesson in living with things in one's house and taking renovations slowly  - if we had rushed into installing ceiling fans in all the rooms at once I don't think we would have realized the problem until it was too late.  And who knows how long it would be before it could be fixed or if we would ever bother to redo all three.

So far most of the action is up in the attic (and I'm not going up there unless absolutely necessary), but here you can see the hole Mike cut in the ceiling and the new fan-appropriate electrical box he installed.  He's getting so good at cutting holes in plaster that I don't even think we'll have to patch much of this part of the ceiling! (Though we do have to patch a lot cracks in other parts unfortunately.)

Here you can see the wires sticking out that are ready for the fan once everything is connected in the attic.  We bought a small white 36 in fan for this room because the room itself is barely 7 ft wide.