When we moved to our house a few years ago, due to the whole buying-of-a-house thing, we had a home improvements budget that made putting up $30 prints ordered off the internet a stretch. (Did I order them anyway? I did.) But the ceiling light in the bedroom that came with the house was simply too hideous, so a couple years after moving in, we got a new one.
I say “we got a new one” so blithely but what really happened was, I turned trying to find a wood-and-paper-style ceiling lamp like the ones that are in Japanese restaurants into a major research project. These are not easy to track down! I ordered one that did not turn out to exist and while I was not ripped off financially (I was either never charged or refunded), this set the whole thing back by many months.
Then I returned to the quest and found it on AliExpress. Affordable (the issue with these is not that they’re high-end) but on some sort of perma-delay such that I’d sort of assumed it was also a mirage. But it made its own endless journey here, then sat in the basement for however long before we figured out hiring an electrician. When they installed it, I asked how you change the bulb, because it’s attached LED, and they were like, you don’t, when the lamp stops working, it’s kaput, but these generally last a while.
The thing is, the thing you’ve probably guessed by now, this crappy light fixture I ordered off the internet did not last a while. It made it what, a year? We got it recently enough that if the lamp in question were not garbage (but stunning garbage), it would merit a Karening.
I couldn’t believe I was back on the lamp websites. I thought I’d found The One! Back to searching lighting stores Toronto, and to going into stores I happened to be passing by (like 2 of them but it was exhausting) and asking if they sell ceiling lamps, and them being like, what. (Sir, this is a Wendy’s.)
I fell in love (in like; I remain loyal to the memory of my Japanese restaurant one; I say “memory” as if it isn’t still affixed over the bed) with a sort of space-age, Art Deco one in a local antiques shop, only to experience something like the blind/online-date thing where the person doesn’t look like their photo, except it did look like the photo, I had just not looked closely enough to realize the extent to which it’s chipped, and it’s not a style where chipped is what you’d necessarily want. Did we really want to start off with that?
The prospect of well there’s always IKEA struck me as too depressing, even though this is where someone who literally runs a (different) local antiques shop directed me. (Was he judging me as a peasant or basic? Was he wrong though.) I did revisit its ceiling lights page online, which I suppose has a couple new additions since I’d last looked, but this thing where every single thing in our house comes from that one store, I don’t know. There also just wasn’t anything.
My life these days doesn’t lend itself to antiquing, let alone in a city where these shops are by appointment, but also, we need something functionality-wise in that spot, but also it has to be something good. A long-term committment.
Then I remembered that there was some made-in-Canada lamp company that is priced slightly but not vastly higher than IKEA, whose website I had scoured when looking for an alternative to the seemingly elusive Japanese restaurant lamp. Of course I couldn’t remember the name of it, only what the lamps looked like. Fortunately, Canada is a country with exactly three lamp stores so mystery solved within like a minute of googling. It seemed if nothing else reputable, which, having been burned (metaphorically; it didn’t explode) last time around is a priority.
I went to the lamp showroom where a very nice salesperson asked me a bunch of questions about the size of the room, the height of the ceilings, and my preferred amount of light in a room, none of which I was able to answer because IKEA never asks you stuff like this.
Suddenly I started to feel like this whole thing was very much too good for the likes of me, as though I was getting fitted for haute couture and not contemplating crossing the $300 (CAD) threshold on a light fixture. But I pressed on because we do need this lamp. And the thing is, it is like couture because even though it is a simple-looking lamp, it is technically custom-made, so I will only be able to have an After photo up in something like 10 weeks plus the time of getting it installed. By the time we no longer need to do diaper changes in lighting a bit too atmospheric for those purposes, diapers themselves may no longer even figure in our lives.