The main stairwell is too tall for ladders.  To allow the painters to paint the ceiling and skylight, we had to build a wooden scaffolding platform on the 2nd floor.  But, before the electricians got around to hanging the chandelier, we had to take the platform down to allow the carpenters to build the stair railing and 2nd floor banister.

So, when it came time to hang the chandelier, we were stumped what to do.

Luckily, our local equipment rental store had a small man-lift that could be rolled into the house via the back patio, and wasn’t too heavy for the floors (800 lbs).  We hung the chandelier last week using this lift.

This chandelier is actually made up of three Pottery Barn pendants, with a custom canopy we had made.  Unfortunately, when we hung the pendants on the canopy, the pendants and the chains touched.  We hadn’t gotten a large enough canopy.  We used some left over extensions from some other pendants to create a spreader to push them apart.  Here is the result.

The middle pendant turned out to have a crack in it.  We purchased a number of this style lights from Pottery Barn, and about half of what we received was damaged.  they are very fragile, and it seems that Pottery Barn has discontinued all of this type, probably due to the high number of returns.  The star pendant we purchased for our bathroom was received broken twice, and when we again tried to replace it, it was no longer available.

So we can’t get a replacement for the broken pendant in our chandelier.  However, we aren’t particularly thrilled with it, so we will continue to look for another one for that space, and when we get it, we’ll rent the lift again, and replace it.  We already have some spots picked out for the two good pendants for places where we chose to not install a fixture initially.