ceiling fan transformation

Howdy…

I’m Sarah’s husband, and she has graciously allowed me to try my hand at blogging.  I like to do DIY projects around the house and basically, that’s what I do when I’m not at work or playing with my family.  So I thought… why not document what I do and share it with the blogging world?  So here it goes. Post #1  How to transform that 90′s ceiling fan into something modern for only $9.

We have this ceiling fan in our living room that I hope would die, because it’s so ugly. However, it continues to churn along solidly as the day it was born.  As you know it’s recession time, so I didn’t exactly have the money to go out and buy a new fan just because the colors were outdated, so I got the great idea to paint it! Here’s my journey below.

Supplies needed.

Newspaper

1 can of “Hammered” spray paint from Home Depot ($5)

1 Roll of Blue painter’s tape ($3)

Phillips screwdriver

Here’s the fan, in all it’s 1991 glory. Shiny as the day it was installed. Awesome. I’m going to just paint the shiny part because now it’s vogue to have a rustic looking fan apparently.  I just loosened two screws around the top mount and let the cover piece slide down to expose the wiring above.

Next,  since we will be playing with wires that carry some serious umphh, I tape off the light switch to prevent any accidental flippage while I’m up there touching them. (In a perfect world, it would be better to flip the breaker, but I’m lazy and I trust Sarah not to flip switches that have blue tape on them, especially when I’m in the room.)

Next, start to unhook the wire nuts connecting the fan to the electricity. I had a light kit on mine fan as well, so there were multiple wires. To prevent headache later, and a possible disaster, I marked the lines with some distinguishing markings so I knew where to connect them later when I put it back together.

Next, I removed the four light decorative covers (loosened the three little screws) as to not get paint on them, and I then I lifted the fan out of the harness. (It sat in a ball and socket swivel joint)  Now at this point I will say, you could have probably somehow figured out how to paint the unit while on the ceiling, but that hurt my brain too much, and I wanted to clean 20 years of dust and dirt out of the housing.

Next, I then removed each blade with it’s shiny metal arm and numbered them so that I put them back in exactly the right place in case of any balancing issues. Each blade is usually attached to a metal arm with three screws, and that arm is attached to the fan housing with another 2 screws. I removed all those, to get easy access to the fan housing.

I also took this opportunity to vaccuum out the housing and dust all the blades extremely well. They were gross!

Next, there were 2 screws on either side of the fan housing that when removed, allowed me to open the fan into 2 halves.  I then lined the inside with blue tape as seen below.  That way I could spray the housing with worrying about getting paint all over the motor on the inside.  I also taped off each light bulb socket, and where the blades attach to the fan motor, and the pull chords that operate the fan and light kit so as no paint would muck up the switches.

I then laid out some newspaper and started to paint the housing and all the fan blade arms. It’s already starting to look more modern.  That hammered paint is awesome as it makes any surface take on that metal, “hammered” look.

I painted half the unit, waited about 45 minutes, rolled it over and painted the other half.

Here it is, all painted. You can see a stark difference underneath the blade arms, where i didn’t paint.  Nobody will ever see those, so why paint them!

I just repeated the steps in above in reverse and made sure the switches on the wall were still off, when I went to connect all the wires. Don’t forget that step! Everything went back together just fine and below we have the finished product!

AFTER

BEFORE