Expensive Lightbulbs & Free Drugs

[Can’t believe it — I hit the wrong but­ton last night and this didn’t pub­lish when it was sup­posed to.  Well, bet­ter late than never, maybe…]

Here’s a note to any­one con­sid­er­ing a remodel project or new home con­struc­tion — pay atten­tion to the light­ing fix­tures you spec.  I wish I’d thought of that before we embarked on our remod­el­ing projects (kitchen and 2 bath­rooms).  It seems like every sin­gle lamp and light fix­ture in our house requires a dif­fer­ent size and dif­fer­ent type of bulb.

I kid you not, a full third of all of our light­bulbs have been burned out for months.  Seriously.

Since the dawn of time (or at least since the begin­ning of our rela­tion­ship), The Hus­band and I have had a tacit agree­ment about bulb respon­si­bil­i­ties.  I’m respon­si­ble for buy­ing the bulbs.  He’s respon­si­ble for replac­ing them.  But tacit or not, it’s not a very good arrange­ment.  We’ve lived in this house for over 6 years and for that entire time I’ve stored extra bulbs in the same place — on the stor­age shelves in the base­ment.  But every sin­gle time a bulb burns out and I request that he replace it, The Hus­band asks me where I keep the bulbs.

The Hus­band doesn’t like man­ual labor and chang­ing bulbs is appar­ently man­ual labor.  In other words, he doesn’t like chang­ing bulbs.  It becomes a con­test of wills — will that final of three bath­room bulbs burn out first or will I break down first and men­tion that I can’t see to count my wrin­kles and new gray hairs.

Well, just as The Hus­band sucks at replac­ing bulbs, I suck at keep­ing them stocked.  Buy­ing the right light bulbs is an errand and I suck at errands.  Well, part of that might be that for 9.5 months out of the year I don’t have daily use of a car but that’s just an excuse.  The truth is light bulbs are expen­sive and I hate buy­ing them.  I hate keep­ing track of all of the max­i­mum wattages and the Par30Ls and the this and thats needed to keep our house ade­quately lit.

So over time the lines of bulb respon­si­bil­ity have blurred a bit.  Every once in a while, I’ll go around the house in a flurry of bulb-replacement activ­ity.  And every once in a while, he’ll come home with a pack­age of generic bulbs.  He only buys one type, how­ever.  The old-fashioned soft white bulbs.  And very few of the lamps and light fix­tures in our house use that type of bulb.

[Okay, before you write to me about the new energy-saving halo­gen bulbs, yes, I have heard of them.  Yes, I use them where I can but that’s only in one or two lamps and they’re the lamps we never use.  Why?  ‘Cause almost every sin­gle light fix­ture in our house is on a dim­mer: kitchen, bath­rooms, and base­ment track light­ing — all on dim­mers.  Another prob­lem is that they have extra wide stems that won’t fit into my kitchen light­ing cans.  Yes, I’ve seen the new dim­ma­ble halo­gens and I use them wher­ever I can, but again, that’s the rare case.]

Today, how­ever, I went light bulb shop­ping.  And it sucked.

The Daugh­ter needed a blood test in prepa­ra­tion with her appoint­ment next week with the endocri­nol­o­gist.  I needed my new thy­roid pre­scrip­tion.  So after school, after she brought her brother home, she and I went out.  First to the doctor’s office where he have her a lab order and his aide gave me free drugs.  About 12 week’s worth of Lev­oxyl!  Wow, what a score!  She did the nee­dle thing and we were done.

Our next stop was Lowe’s.  Now The Daugh­ter never would have agreed to adding a lightbulb-shopping trip to our after­noon if it weren’t in her best inter­est.  A cou­ple of days ago her “touch lamp” went dark and it has remained dark because our light­bulb stash didn’t include any 3-way bulbs.

My shop­ping list was big­ger than a sin­gle 3-way bulb how­ever.  I needed those white globe bulbs for the kids’ bath­room — that fix­ture was down to a sin­gle func­tion­ing bulb.  And some of those long-stemmed flood bulbs for the kitchen — less than half the lights in the kitchen cur­rently work.  Plus those lit­tle chan­de­lier bulbs for the wall sconces at the top of the base­ment stairs and the base­ment hall­way — those have been burned out for over 6 months.

I should have known bet­ter than to go to Lowe’s.  It was directly on our route home though.  Still, it was a stu­pid mis­take and one that resulted in no bulbs for the kitchen.  I usu­ally get my bulbs at The Home Depot.  I know they carry the right bulbs and exactly where they are.  Lowe’s didn’t have the right size in the cor­rect wattage.  I looked every­where.  I was tempted to aban­don my cart and go to The Home Depot but The Daugh­ter would have mutinied.  She had home­work, she was feel­ing bad, and she was tired.  Me too.  I whimped out, spent a for­tune on bulbs, didn’t get every­thing I needed, got some I thought I needed but didn’t, and went home.  Ugh.  It’ll prob­a­bly be another 3 months before I get full light­ing in my kitchen again.  I sup­pose it’s just as well, maybe it’ll be so dark in there no one will notice how messy it is.

Lowe’s — $60.04

Related posts:

1. Day 6
2. Day 112: Returns, Gro­ceries, & More Gifts
3. Day 80: The Clar­itin Saga Con­tin­ues plus 1/2-Ton of Cement
4. $$: Church, Din­ing, Gro­ceries, Cos­met­ics, & Swimming
5. Day 90: Gut­ter Balls!