smart light bulbs for a smarter home

for those that don't know us, james and i tend to be (or at least consider ourselves) pretty tech-savvy. we love when technology makes our lives simpler. one thing we are terrible at doing is turning on and off the lights in our home. mainly just the outdoor lights, and a light for sanford when it gets dark.

we already had a way of manually turning on the living room light for sanford when we're away from home, but we'd often forget. and waiting until we got home to turn out the outside lights could mean stumbling (i'm a bit of a clutz) and fumbling our way from the garage to the front door in the dark. and the light on the street side of the house, well - it's switch is in the guest bedroom, and near the floor, where you would expect an outlet. needless to say, i never turned that light on, which meant it would often stay on, or stay off, for longer than intended.

so when the belkin wemo home automation system came out with smart light switches that you could program with IFTTT, we jumped on that train immediately. except when we opened up the electrical switches to install them, we realized that the electrical in our house is so old it's not compatible with them!

then, the other week, belkin released their smart led light bulbs! it requires a small central link that controls the bulbs via wifi, but would allow us to have programmable lights even without having to update the electrical! we bought the starter kit (with wemo link and two smart bulbs) and two additional bulbs immediately.

let me say right off the bat that we had a lot of trouble getting this set up, and that the system still needs a lot of work. the system is technically really easy to set up. plug in the link, install the lightbulb and turn it on, open the wemo app, connect to link via wifi which walks you through the rest of detecting the light bulbs that are on and emitting a signal. however, just our luck, we tried it with just one light bulb first, and it was busted. we didn't know it was busted though, as the light itself functioned, but the link could never find it. after several frustrated attempts and restarting of the link, i decided to try another light bulb. voila! it worked. 

also, the app itself is slow. and buggy. rules are easy to set up, but once set, we haven't been able to change them. the app just hangs. our workaround is to delete the rule and create a new one. plus, for now, you can either set them to come on/off based on time, or sunrise/sunset. it would be great if we could make time-offsets (eg. 30 minutes before sunset).

all that being said, once we got it all set up (minus the one bulb we need to return, but that's okay because we got 4 total so we'd have an extra) it's been great. we have the outside lights set to turn on at sunset and off at sunrise. it's be so nice to just not have to think about. 

not as pretty as an edison bulb, but i'll take the convenience over pretty in this case.

so yea - it's a bit of a mixed bag, but totally worth it in our opinion. hopefully over time the software will only get better. and when we get the electrical in the house upgraded, we'll be able to use those switches instead, and use these lights in other spots around the house.

the outside of the house gets a little love.

we replaced the light fixture on the side of the house, and we couldn't be more excited about it!

the existing light on the side of the house (visible from the kitchen and dining rooms) isn't inherently bad, but it looked really janky because it's broken and missing several pieces of glass (james turned it so that the two intact pieces face the street). it doesn't help that we essentially gave up on it, so didn't even bother to clean it, letting the spiderwebs and dead bugs just run rampant.

gross.

it's bothered us from the day we moved in, and we look in the outdoor lighting section of every home depot and lowe's that we go into, every single time. surprisingly, there just aren't that many options for a small, outdoor-rated ceiling mounted pendant light - especially in a style that makes sense with a hundred year old craftsman house! in the end, after a visit to rejuvenation in culver city, we ordered this jordan valley semi-flush mount (outdoor-rated!) in antique copper, with a six inch clear glass globe shade. guys, it is so pretty. it was more than we really wanted to spend on a side light, but the quality is palpable. and again, so so so so pretty. you'll see.

eeeee....! (so pretty!)

we thought getting the old fixture off would be a piece of cake - according to the instructions, just a screwdriver and pliers, right? maybe a vise grip. but of course, this fixture has been there for decades, and nothing is ever as easy as you'd hope.

there was so much rust, and stripping of the little bolts holding the mount in place, that we just could not get it off. it was basically spining freely inside the mount, so we had to resort to a dremel. i can't say how grateful i am that james has a pretty decent set of tools at his disposal, and we didn't have to make an additional trip to the store for such a relatively minor setback.

anyway, once we got the mount removed, it was relatively simple. phew! we didn't know what we would find (again, super old house). so finding a standard black/white power/neutral set of wires was quite a relief. 

we're not too pleased that the little junction mount sticks out about half an inch (and you'll see why in a second), but at least it cleaned up pretty nicely, and we were quickly able to wire up the new fixture to it.

even though we really don't get much rain in los angeles (especially this drought-y year), we still wanted to be safe, and by chance found these waterproof connectors. we didn't really get how they would work, until we used them. when you stick the wires into it, it breaks some seal inside it that is holding a silicone sealant, which coats the wires, waterproofing the connection. pretty nifty!

and voila! however, can you see what i see? there's a bit of a gap there between the mount and the beam..

we're going to leave it as is for the moment, but we'll need to find some way to make this look better. knowing the area, it will just become infested with more spiderwebs and bugs. we're thinking of making an additional wooden mount piece to go between the two.

With such a pretty fixture, we couldn't just use the old CFL in it. We ended up going with an edison bulb, which is less efficient, but gives off a much warmer and prettier light for the side porch.

the holidays, and curtains!

ah, the holidays. we had so much fun decorating the table for halloween, that we had to do it for christmas too! we kept the pretty antique bowl and added pinecones, berry garlands, and decorative candle holders from michaels . oh, and the pretty silver damaske table runner is from sur la table.

outside, we only put some string lights up on the two small trees in the front yard. it's not much, but we didn't want to put too much effort into the exterior decorations just yet this year.

we also put up a small christmas tree in the corner of the dining room (all the same decorations as last year) and - wait for it -purchased curtains!!!!!!!!!!! the curtain rods were from overstock, and the curtains themselves were from target (the sheer are nate berkus heathered herringbone in gray, and the decorative are threshold grayson toile floral in shell and chocolate). and yea, i was too lazy to iron them first, but i figure they'll de-wrinkle on their own over time.

what i really love about them though, is how much warmer and cozier they make the house. without them, and all our white walls, things felt really sharp and cold.

here are really old photos from when we first got our dining table, but they show you what our fishbowl of a dining and living room used look like:

and yea, we've cleared out so much of the erroneous stuff too - the bookshelf is long gone, and other than the wine fridge along that back wall, all of that has been removed and replaced with much nicer things (but that's for another post). it's really starting to feel like a home, guys!

and just a reminder, this is what our mantle looks like:

also, gold frog and rafiki wish you peace and serenity this christmas!