FAUX CEILING MEDALLION

Allow me to introduce you to the faux-painted ceiling medallion. 

Faux-painted ceiling medallion, meet non-existent readers.

Some background: 

The apartment came chockfull of the most basic, cheap light fixtures available (popularly referred to as "boob lights"). 

Exhibit A: 

They had to go.

A huge part of making your living space personal is switching out any of the cookie-cutter basic fittings that you can. Switching a light is one of the easiest fixes and makes such a huge difference!

Unfortunately for us, taking down the existing light fixture left behind the most awful discoloured, yellowish stain - never rarely a good thing. This thing was like smokers' teeth yellow. 

Exhibit B:

This too had to go.

A ceiling medallion may have been the obvious choice (repainting the ceiling was just not happening), but I didn't like the design of any of the ceiling medallions anywhere I looked - they are either way too ornate or just too chunky looking. I wanted to keep it minimal, so I thought WHY NOT JUST PAINT OUT THE CIRCLE BLACK, TO MIMIC A CEILING MEDALLION? The vintage metal pendant fixture I bought from Kijiji a few weeks ago was destined to go where this unfortunate stain was, and I knew that the fixture, cord and cap were all going to be painted black, so the leap seemed logical.

The process was actually harder than I expected. First of all, craning your neck and contorting your body to paint on the ceiling blows. Also, I thought I could just sort of "free hand" the existing outline of the yellow circle stain and move on. 

Here is what it looked like when I stepped down from the painting to have a look:

Yikes. 

So I had to go back with a smaller brush and continually round that baby out. It took some doing, but I pretty much got there. 

The faux-painted ceiling medallion does a good job balancing the weight of the actual pendant with some substance on the ceiling. If you can imagine the fixture only hanging from the smaller cap, it just seems inadequate up there.

I think this is a resourceful way to cover up similar stains if you run into the same problem somewhere you are renting. The BEST part is that you can just throw the ugly old boob light back up when you leave and no one will ever know the difference! 

Stain or no stain, I think it is a cool effect. I imagine the same application in bright, vibrant colours would look really awesome too, bringing an unexpected pop of colour to your often-overlooked ceilings. 

By the way - that lamp amirite? I rewired it with some basic lamp cord from Home depot, bought a cap and sprayed all of it with a high-heat black enamel spray paint. This was recommended online, to avoid wear and discoloration from the heat of the light bulb. It's not anymore expensive than normal spray paint, and doesn't give off any weird smell when the light has been on for a while. 

Word.

An artsy b&w pic of the new lighting situation. 

I dig it. What do you all think?

bZd