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How to Replace a Ceiling Fan {Part I}

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Last summer, we chatted about the fact that most of us need ceiling fans in our bedrooms, regardless of the fact that we rarely see them in the bedrooms featured in our favorite magazines.  I presented you with my ceiling fan dilemma – a dark bladed fan on my newly white ceiling – and you guys offered all sorts of solutions, from replacing the fan with a white one to painting the blades.

So in July, I began my search for the “perfect” ceiling fan for the bedroom.  I didn’t find it until December, and it was on back order.  I was honestly getting ready to cancel the order and find another fan (this one was a great style and an even better price), when lo and behold I recently received an email saying it had been shipped.  Hooray!

The fan arrived last week, and I spent some of Sunday replacing the old fan with the new fan.  It is an easy task once you know what to do, so I thought I would put together a picture-heavy tutorial for you in case you want to tackle the project yourself.  I’m going to split the tutorial into two parts:  1) Removing the old fan and 2) Installing the new fan.  Please remember that every ceiling fan is built a little bit differently, so refer to your fan’s instruction manual, if needed.

How to Remove a Ceiling Fan

1.  Turn off the electricity to the fan at your breaker box.  You will likely find your box in your garage, a closet or your utility room.  All you need to do is flip the breaker (the switch) that powers your fan.  If you don’t know which is the right breaker, turn the fan on and flip breakers on and off until the fan stops spinning.

2.  Begin by unscrewing the finial (mine’s a ball) on the bottom of your light kit or cover plate if you don’t have a light kit. Mine had a little decorative shroud over a threaded rod; yours may be a little different.

3.  With a screwdriver, unscrew the three screws around the sides of the base below the fan blades.

4.  With the three screws removed, you can now remove the light kit electrical portion from the fan.  The shroud will slip off and you will need to disconnect the wires from the light kit to the fan.  Mine were crimped wires that plugged into each other.  Yours may have wire nuts that will need to be twisted off.

5.  With the light kit/light kit cover removed, you will see another set of three screws that need to be addressed.  One screw needs to be completely removed and the other two just need to be loosened.

You will be able to tell by looking which two only need to be loosened, because you will simply just twist the component to remove it from the screws.

6.  Next, you will remove the fan blades.  There are two screws that attach each blade arm to the fan base.  Remove them in a star pattern to keep your fan as balanced as possible.

7.  Now that the blades are removed, you can reach the ring on the fan that touches the ceiling.  It hides some more screws you need to remove, so take it off by twisting and pulling down.

8.  There will be three screws near the top of the fan that connect it to the plate or bracket that holds it on the ceiling.  Carefully unscrew those screws.

9.  Now that those screws are removed, you can twist and pull the fan base off of the ceiling.  Before you can put it down, you will need to disconnect the wires between the ceiling and the fan.  As you can see, mine were attached with wire nuts that twist off.

This particular fan has a very heavy motor, so this is definitely my least favorite part of the removal!  Not all fans are this heavy.

10.  The plate and remote control receiver (if your fan has one) will be left on the ceiling.  There are two screws that attach it to the ceiling box, so remove those two screws.  Pull off the plate and remove it from the wires.

11.  You will be left with a hole in your ceiling with exposed wiring.  If you aren’t going to immediately install a new fan or light source, go ahead and cap off each of the wires with a wire nut.  You can see in this photo that I have one more wire nut that I need to place on the white wire.

Why are the wire nuts different colors?  They are simply color-coded that way by size.  The blue nuts are tiny (not pictured), the orange nuts are small, the yellow nuts are medium, and the red nuts (not pictured) are large.  You choose a wire nut based upon wire gauges and how many wires you are twisting together.

Congratulations!  You just removed your ceiling fan!  In Part II, I will show you how to install your new fan and show off the fan that I waited all of those months to receive.

Have you ever removed a ceiling fan yourself?  Or, does it seem like something that makes you nervous?

The Evolution of a Light Fixture

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As the days pass, I become more and more in love with interesting light fixtures for my home.  So often I feel like lighting is overlooked when a simple change to an existing fixture would make a tremendous impact in a room.

Enter the sad, builder’s grade vanity fixtures that we have in every bathroom of our house.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with the vanity fixtures, but they are boring and cast all of the light downwards.  I’ve long thought that their days were numbered, so I spent a lot of time shopping for a new fixture to put into the powder bath I am redoing.  Unlike the one shown above, the original fixture in that bathroom only had two lights, so that room could have a whopping two, 60-watt light bulbs.  Since it was the only fixture in the room, you can bet that the light in there was very depressing.

Because I am going to replace them all eventually, I decided to play musical light fixtures.  I swapped the fixture above my sink in the master with the 2-light model from the powder bath.  I spray painted the 3-light fixture flat black (Rustoleum Universal Flat Black), bought clear, seeded glass shades, and put in those Edison bulbs I love so much.

And it was a big, fat negatory!  The color was wrong with the other fixture we were installing in the ceiling to add more light, the shades were too wimpy, and the heavily seeded glass greatly distorted the look of the bulbs.  It was time to go back to the drawing board.

I took the fixture down and sprayed it in a Rustoleum Oil Rubbed Bronze finish, but it really didn’t look too different than the flat black.  So, I sprayed it again (by now, this is it’s 3rd coat of paint) in a Rustoleum Antique Copper finish.  Closer, but still not right.

So, what did I do?  Well, I got artistic.  I grabbed a can of Krylon Leather Brown that I had in my garage and gave it a quick once over to darken the copper.  I essentially just misted it instead of coating it.  Then, I did the same thing with a mist of the Rustoleum Metallic Oil Rubbed Bronze that I had used before.

It was much better, but it still wasn’t exactly what I wanted.  So, I did just as you would expect and glazed it with my beloved Ralph Lauren glaze tinted to Black Silk.  I swapped the shades for a larger, less seeded bell shape.  It was suddenly perfection and coordinated so well with our newly installed overhead lighting.

The moral of this story is not to be afraid to try to change the look of something in your home that you were planning on getting rid of anyway.  I saved myself a great deal of money by not having to buy a new fixture, and with my layering and misting of different paints, I was able to customize the finish to fit my room.  Always remember that if you don’t like it in the first place, no harm can come from trying to change it.  <–Tweet This.

The rest of the bathroom reveal is coming soon.  I had some friends over for a little girl time this weekend, and they were all blown away by seeing it in person.  Maybe I can figure out how to fly each of you down here for the grand tour.  🙂

Do you have anything original to your home that you hated but now love thanks to a simple update?  If not, grab those spray paint cans and get to work!