Cleaning Vintage Chandeliers

Our house has two glorious antique chandeliers that have been with the house since it was built in 1928. I l.o.v.e. them. They were missing several crystal pendants and the dirt that piled on the fixtures after we sanded the wood floors made them a bit sad. I procrastinated for a long time about cleaning them and looking for pendants because I knew it was going to be a job. And I was right.

Both of the chandeliers are the same, so I had to take over 200 pendants off of each one and wash and dry them individually. The wires holding the pendants together were so brittle after many years, so a lot of them broke while I was working on them. Talk about getting frustrated! The hubby decided that he would clean the brass part of the light, so he unwired the lights from the ceiling. When he did that, we found that the wiring was bad and there were pieces inside the light that were charcoaled. He rewired everything (he’s so talented!) 🙂 and thankfully, THAT fire hazard is gone.

After all of that, I started looking for a place to buy some old pendants from and found the exact ones like ours in a little shop on Etsy. I had to email her, and was glad she found several for me (she mostly sells them for jewelry making). You can check out her shop, Caity Ash Badashery here. I was so excited to find the pendants and now the chandeliers look like new. They are so beautiful and the light just seems to twinkle more.

Here’s a “before” and you can see where some of the pendants are missing. I wish you could see the mound of dirt and sawdust that was there!

Another before…

Here’s one where I think you can see how dull the pendants were.

Here she is in all her glory. Put some clothes on, girl! 😉

And here she is today! All prettied up. We added the ceiling medallion and then painted it gold, then white and sanded it to get the look we got.

Here’s one of the chandy in the living room. You can see the other one in the background in the dining room (ignore the Santa’s on the table who haven’t found their way into hibernation yet).

 

We think they turned out beautifully. For a few days after we got the first one finished, we’d turn on the light and just stare at it talking about how pretty it looked. Ha! We’re crazy…

Linking up at:

Til the next time,
kassie