Great Auction Finds, Crystal Chandelier, Throne

Its been quite awhile since I posted, we had a very busy summer and end of the year. Now that the holiday's are over and things slow down as we go through winter, I can try to get back on track. Over the last few months we've found some pretty cool things at local auctions to add to our house. A couple of the highlights are a crystal prism chandelier. It actually started out as 2 identical chandeliers, I won both of them, but they were both in such bad shaped that I needed to part them out and put together one complete chandelier. I'm not sure what the previous owners did to them, but it looks like they had been tossed around quite a bit in storage. There were several broken prisms, broken glass and even a broken metal arm on one of them. After getting one put back together and all cleaned up, it turned out to be a really nice piece. The prisms are quality leaded cut glass.

I even had enough left over prisms to add several to another chandelier that only had pressed glass prisms. I love the color you get from the leaded glass.

And probably my favorite piece, my parents actually were able to bid on this for me when I was out of the state for work. Its a hand carved throne that stands 6 feet tall!

The arms are carved lions heads.

Insteon Lighting Network

There's not really a whole lot I can show with pictures for this one, but its pretty cool so I thought it was worth mentioning. I set up all the lighting in the house to be on a network, as in you can turn on and off lighting from multiple places or even with the computer or an iphone (if I had one). Basically each switch is a little computer, it gives and recieves wireless and wired signals "talking" between each other. Now, from say the dining room, I can see what lights are on, and turn them on and off. From the kitchen lights to the upstairs hallway lights, they are all linked together. Likewise, from the master bedroom, I can see what lights are on downstairs, and turn them on or off.


The way I set it up was I worked from the back of the house forward, the kitchen is A, dining room B, etc.

Each button is backlit with an LED light. So in this switch here, the light is ON in the dining room, and also you can see how the A is lit up, meaning the kitchen light is on. Each light also is dimmable by holding the button down. With the computer software you can set lights to come on and off at specific times as well as set the rate at which it turns on or off. If in the morning you want the lights to slowly come on you could use it like an alarm clock. The bedroom light would slowly get brighter over say, a 5 minute time period.