Lights Out

When Curt and I built our house 6 years ago, we were both first time (soon-to-be) homeowners, and pretty clueless about things related to not only owning a home, but the building of that home. So we didn't ask a lot of questions, such as "where is said light fixture we are picking out exactly going to be placed." Shopping for our light fixtures was not a great, get along, moment for us. I wanted nice fixtures and Curt wanted cheap fixtures. We mostly compromised (some of us, well me, very begrudgedly) and have mostly descent ones, but a few definitely leave something to be desired. Anyway, one set of light fixtures I have never liked are the ones in our stairway (same fixture, same switch, two occurrences). I hated them even more on the walk through of our home where I found one placed in the middle of the stairwell, at the top of our fairly high ceiling. We had thought it would be placed above the landing at the top of the stairs. Shows what we knew. I asked the builder's representative how we'd ever change that light bulb and he basically said he didn't know. Nice. So we waited for the inevitable. And waited. And waited for 6 years, until it finally went out this week. We'd replaced its partner fixture's bulb once or twice, but the big one up high stayed lit. Today Curt went out and bought a new contraption for changing light bulbs (the packaging never indicated it could be used on the fixtures) and got to work. After some frustrations he finally got the fixture down and the bulb changed. We put a CFL bulb in there so hopefully it will have another lengthy life ahead of it. The tough task came to putting the fixture back up. The apparatus thingy suctioned itself to the fixture but not enough to turn it properly. Curt began to lose the grip on the fixture and told me I'd have to catch it as it dropped (given that I hate the fixture I probably wasn't going to try too hard to catch it). I told him it was probably better if I held the changing thingy and he caught the fixture. We had a switch off, the fixture began to drop, and I see Bodie walking up the stairs. I screamed! Curt caught the fixture thankfully...the last thing I needed was for it to drop straight on Bodie, or shatter on the half wall and crumble on Bodie. With his next attempt Curt was able to get the fixture back up. I believe this fixture has shot ahead of our ugly bathroom fixtures on my list of replacements. We are definitely going to get an open, drop down type fixture in the future.