Dressing up the Ceiling – Where to begin?

I inherited two BIG ceiling medallions several years ago. They’ve been in the storage room since we moved into the house. I’ve pulled them out at least four times over the past couple of years… looked at them, and then put them right back in the storage room. They are beautiful medallions, but I just couldn’t see past…  this:

One of the medallions

Somebody put a lot of work into this...

As you can see, the medallions were meticulously hand painted… the back story on these is that Richard’s mom was going to put them into a house she had been renovating. However, she often took advice from her very assertive best friend, whose decorating style is, err,  lets say, maximalist.

And I didn’t think the medallions would work because they only had a one inch hole for the wires and such. In my old house, the junction boxes in the ceiling actually protrude a bit. But looking online on a lot of FAQs assured me that I could cut a hole to any size that was needed and the medallions would still look great. They are lightweight polyurethane and a jigsaw would do the trick for opening up the hole for mounting.

And let me just say that when I started my weekend, I didn’t really have any intention of messing around with the medallions. All I wanted to do was create chandelier cord / chain covers. I got inspired from a post on Friday from JJ (the fab BLAH BLAH BLAHger blog) talking about fabric glue. I wanted to cover my chains, but I didn’t want to pull the light fixtures down (my ceilings are fourteen feet tall – fiddling around with electricity on a ladder at that height makes me a little nervous!) So I thought, well, I’d just hem a flat strip of fabric and glue up the fabric in tube around the fixtures and scrunch.

My Current Light Fixation. That's a looong chain.

So this is how I get started on things – little projects will always turn into BIG projects. I bought the glue and the fabric, but I realized I’d still have to be up on that dang ladder, fiddling around with fabric – why not just take the whole kit down and kill those two proverbial birds with the one proverbial stone.

So at 10:00 a.m. Sunday morning I brought out the medallions, cleaned them up, and started priming. I thought, oh, I’ll have these painted by noon. Wrong! Two coats of primer later and two coats of semi-gloss trim paint later, it was 5:00 p.m, my light fixtures still on the floor and I hadn’t even pulled out the sewing machine yet for the cord covers.

This one might get fixated too...

But it all came together pretty quickly after the paint dried. Tomorrow I’ll put up some pictures for you all to check out the results. And I think I’ll do a step-by-step on how to make chandelier chain / cord covers. For some reason, there’s not a good demo out the in land of Google, but trust me it’s simple and fun.