Dumb and Dumber

Brian had the day off work today, since he's been working longer days to get every other Friday off. He decided today would be a good day to get a new ceiling fan for our bedroom because the chain broke off ours the other day and now it won't turn on. He warned me that the last time he installed a ceiling fan, he did something wrong, blew a fuse in the house and blew the motor in the fan! We went to Lowe's to pick out a new fan. The one we chose was called the 'Five Minute Fan' by Hunter. According to the box, it's so easy you can install it in 5 minutes. As soon as we got home, Brian was eager to get started, but had to run back to Lowe's to get the extension rod, since our ceiling is extremely high. Apparently he thought it was in the box. It wasn't. As soon as he returned from Lowe's the second time, Lacey and I had to leave for a birthday party, from 5:30 -7:30 so he and Lawson were on their own to finish the job.

Lacey and I arrived home after the party to find Brian still working on the Five Minute Fan. He admitted to having to go back to Lowe's again! He ended up getting the wrong length of extension rod the first time and had to return it for the shorter one. He also admitted to having tried to 'wing it' without the directions, thus having to do several things at least twice. I, myself, tend to be a by the book kinda gal, so I offered to help by carefully reading the directions. If I have to say it myself, the directions were extremely unclear!! There was no mention of what to do with a red wire coming out of the ceiling!! Even with both of us winging it AND reading the directions, we had to hook up the wires 3 different ways in order to have both the fan and light working by both the switch and pull chains.

Once we finally got the wiring figured out, the only thing left to do was install the globe over the lights. Easy right? Wrong! So . . . the manual shows threading the chain for the fan and the chain for the light through the little holes on the hardware and then down through the 2 holes in the globe. As we're doing a balancing act on the footboard of our bed trying to thread the fan chain and hold the globe, we realize that the globe only has one hole! We were baffled as to what to do with the light chain, which was heading straight down through the place where we would have to screw the whole thing together. We took everything down and I quickly referred to the manual. No help there; their picture shows a globe with two holes. We decided we would have to cut off the chain in order to get it screwed on. Luckily we knew enough to turn the lights off before we began cutting anything. We got everything put together and stepped back to admire our work, proud that we had come up with such an ingenious way to solve a gliche in their design! As we flipped the light switch, we realized that as Brian was cutting, he accidentally pulled the chain and turned the light off just as he made the cut! Seriously, the light was off with no chain to turn it back on! After a full out household search for tweezers, we were able to manipulate the chain to turn the lights back on and then get the whole thing put back together again. Exhausted from all my mental genius, I laid down on the bed to check out our beautiful new fan from that angle. From my vantage point laying on the bed, I noticed that the cap used to screw it all together was hollow- yep, hollow for the chain to hang through. Brian and I couldn't decide who was dumb and who was dumber! LOL Hey at least we didn't blow the motor! :)

By the way, there was not only a misprint in their directions, but also on the box . . . It should have said "Five Hour Fan". ;)