Replacing the Weathered Back Deck Outdoor Light Fixture
The outdoor light fixture on our back deck was the little sibling to the original set we had on the front of the house before we replaced those. It was the same shape and weathered state, only slightly smaller.
After I painted our deck furniture, and Zach started tearing down the deck itself, I decided it was time to swap the light. Lighting really is one of the easiest ways to modernize a room... or should I say, deck. I picked out a cute farmhouse looking lantern in black with built-in LED lighting.
Taking the old down, I found they didn’t install this with an electrical box. The wires just came right out of the side of the house. Because of this shortcut the builder made, the standard hardware my new light came with wouldn’t work because I couldn’t get the light flush with the wall for a tight installation. There’s a little screw-like part that needed to be about an inch shorter. I wasn’t sure where to find one of these, so we first tried to saw off a piece of the part. That didn’t work... so to the store I went.
I spent about 20 minutes looking through Lowes. The lighting people sent me to electrical, and the electrical people sent me to hardware. No one could find what I needed.
Before leaving I decided to try the lighting area one more time and found a lamp repair kit. It actually had just what I needed, even though I didn’t know I needed it... a shorter screw AND a bracket with a bend in it that would help get additional space between the wall and the fixture. Glad I tried it because it worked!
This lantern is so cute. I love the style of it and in the backyard, we can rock the farmhouse lighting look no problem. I was worried about not clashing styles too much with the traditional nature of the front of the house when I told you about the light fixture switch up there, but that isn’t an issue out back.
The lantern has a dusk to dawn feature, so while we can’t turn it on while it’s light out, we can leave the switch on and it’ll do its thing at night. We leave our front of house lights on all the time – wish they had that feature but there’s no way I’m going to try to tackle those lights again!
Need a fix-up? Here’s what we used:
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