...and told me it was a small basket chandelier that would look perfect someplace in my house and that all the pieces were there, I had two thoughts:
1. Ick.
2. There is no way that thing is complete.
(Even Gracie Cat seems skeptical, doesn't she?)
Stuck in the house the other day because of pouring rain, I decided to take it apart and clean it. I had my doubts that it would ever be clean because it had been stored in a barn for 20 years, according to Mare. I cleaned one strand, just to see.
That was pretty promising.
So I washed the rest of the strands and pieces of strands.
Quite the improvement, huh?
I didn't realize there were so many, or that it would take over an hour to wash them very carefully, piece by piece, in warm soapy water. After they air-dried and I found my needle-nose pliers, I went to work reassembling the chandelier. The glass pieces are held together by little brass pins that are looped at one end. (You can kinda see them in the second photo if you bigify it.) Of course, I didn't take any photos of the reassembly process because that would've been a logical thing to do. I put the chandelier upside down on the kitchen table (like it is in the first photo) and hooked all the strands to the top of it, then put the broken strands back together, then hooked each little strand to the bottom of the light. That was pretty tedious, let me tell you. By some kind of miracle, all the pieces are there. Only two of them are chipped and one's been broken and glued back together.
I still didn't know what the thing looked like right-side-up. I really didn't want to wait until the ceiling's finished in the back bedroom to find out--you can see by the next photo that I have a long way to go with that still--so I rigged up something temporary with a threaded rod that I stuck through the middle of the existing light fixture.
This is a horrible photo but my rigged-up hanger was really unstable and I was afraid the whole thing would crash to the floor, so I snapped one quick photo and called it good.
(Lordy, that really is a bad photo. It makes the chandelier look like something in the wreck of the Titanic, but you kinda get the idea.) It's not very big. The plate at the top is maybe 14" or so, and it's about as tall as it is wide. I can't decide if I like it enough to use it in the back bedroom or not. For now, the chandelier's in the second parlor with the strands all splayed out, waiting for me to decide if it belongs in the back bedroom after I finish that ceiling. Which may be sooner rather than later, if it keeps on raining.