I will do all sorts of things around the house, but I admit that doing electrical work sometimes scares me. I think it is the issue that if you do it wrong, you could kill yourself or catch your house on fire, but no pressure! Really most of the work is not that difficult. I still leave the big stuff to professionals, but little tasks like changing a lighting fixture can be done easily by yourself. First thing you need to know is turn off the fixture by the breaker. Not electrocuting yourself is a good thing. So here is the light fixture I removed, and now you understand why I replaced it.
Like a lot of fixtures, this one was attached to wall via a large screw. Remove the nut in the middle of the sconce, and the sconce can be removed.
Then unscrew the wire nuts and remove the old sconce’s wires, and the sconce can be removed from the wall. Then remove the old mounting bar from the outlet box by the removing the screws that attach it to the outlet box.
Here is the new fixture. Note that it has a black wire, a white wire, and a bare grounding wire. It came with a mounting bar that has a green screw on it. That is the grounding screw.
Install the new mounting bar. The fixture grounding wire needs to be attached to the outlet’s grounding wire and also the mounting bar’s grounding screw. This fixture’s instructions said to attach the outlet’s grounding wire to the grounding screw, then attach the fixture’s grounding wire to the outlet’s grounding wire. Because the grounding wire in this outlet box was already wrapped around a screw in the back of the box, there was not enough wire to do this. So I wrapped the fixture’s grounding wire around the mounting bar’s grounding screw, then wrapped the fixture’s grounding wire to the outlet’s grounding wire and secured with a wire nut. Then I attached the fixture’s white wire to the outlet’s white wire, and black to black, and secured with wire nuts.
Here is an up close view of the wiring attached to the grounding screw.
I then shoved all the wires back into the outlet box.
The sconce is then attached to the wall via the large screw in the middle of the mounting bracket and secured with the decorative nut.
The glass shade is then attached, and in the case of this fixture, secured with a metal ring that came with the fixture. Add a light bulb, and ta-da, and new working, beautiful light fixture.
