CSN Chandelier Review

A few weeks ago, I was asked to be a CSN preferred blogger.  Of course, I readily agreed and decided that for my first post, I would do a product review.  I was given a gift certificate to spend on any CSN store website. 

O.
My.
Goodness!

Where to start??!!  They have so many things in their stores and there are 200 different stores, so there was a lot to look through and a lot to consider.  So after searching many nights online, I settled on a new chandelier for our dining room and a new valance for our master bathroom.  (I'll tell you about the valance tomorrow.)

Here is our old chandelier:

There is absolutely nothing wrong with it...except I didn't like it.  We've had it for the last 7 years that we've lived in the house.  It's provided light just fine, but there were a few things I didn't like.  First of all, I didn't like the fact that it was white.  It really looked like it had been spray painted white with the same stuff they paint popcorn ceilings with.  Maybe it wasn't, but that's what it looked like.  It wasn't smooth white, but kind of bumpy.  Second of all, we didn't like that it took special bulbs with the little base.  They were more expensive and annoying to change.  I really wanted a light that took standard light bulbs as well as standard compact fluorescent bulbs.  There was also an additional light on the bottom that we never used.  And the biggest reason for changing, I didn't pick it.  The light was already here when we bought the house so I had no say in it.

For our new light we chose this rubbed oil bronze light with glass globes.  It arrived pretty quickly and looked like it came from Asia (it was packed in newspaper with chinese-looking symbols on it).  We got it all out of the box and right away started to install it.  Now, my husband is an electrical engineer so he is pretty good with wiring up new lights.  We have installed 3 ceiling fans and 2 overhead lights in our house, so we kind of felt like we knew what we were doing.

Which was a good thing because the directions were NOT good at all.  It looked like it had been translated into English badly.  It's also a good thing that we paid attention to the old light when we were taking it down because that answered a lot of questions that the directions didn't.

Installing a chandelier is not as quick and easy as installing a regular overhead light.  It was starting to take a while and we were running out of daylight (we had obviously turned off power to the kitchen and dining room and were working just by daylight).  So we finally got the light installed and it was time to add the glass globes.  I guess we should have checked those more closely to begin with. We got 4 of them put on and went to pull the last one out of the box and it was cracked all the way up the globe.

Seeing as we had already uninstalled the old one and installed the new one, we left it like this for the moment.

A little crooked but still providing enough light to eat and do homework until we got a replacement globe.  I figured it also wasn't completely bad because it gave me a chance to review CSN's customer service and replacement parts policy.  And let me tell you, getting a replacement part ordered was the easiest thing in the world.  I didn't have to call anyone, or wait on hold.  I just went online and logged into my account on CSN.  I found my order then looked on the links on the left side and found the "Ordering replacement parts" link.  It told me exactly what to do and within 5 minutes I had ordered the replacement globe.

Our replacement globe also came pretty quickly.  I ordered it on Aug 4 and it was delivered on Aug 11.  Here it is with all the globes:

Overall we really like the light.  It takes regular bulbs and we even have a couple CF bulbs in there (they do hang down farther then the globes).  I love the look and color of it.  I do have a few complaints.  It seems very hard to get the globes to sit evenly.  They aren't parallel on the bottom.  You can move the arm that they sit on, but it's hard to get them all parallel and evenly spaced.  I think the fact that you can move the arm so easily is the real problem.  I think it got moved around in transit and wasn't sitting correctly when we got it.  We're afraid to move the arms too much because we don't want them to fall off.  Here's a picture of that:

My other complaint is that is doesn't seem to provide as much light as our last one did.  I'm sure it's due to the design of it, with the bulbs pointing down instead of up like the last one.  So that's our fault for not realizing that when we picked this particular light.  I guess that's one disadvantage of buying things online and not seeing them in person.  It's hard to see where the light goes.

But overall I like this light better than the one we had in there before.  I think we might raise it up a bit to see if it lights more of the area that way.

Stay tuned for my review of my new bathroom valance.