Husband and I have very tall ceilings in our dining room, and kitchen. Most of the lights are recessed. These are the lights in the kitchen:

We haven’t had any bulbs burn out, but when we do I am afraid I will have to phone an electrician to come and change the bulb. We haven’t a tall enough ladder, and I can’t manage heights any longer.

The living room also has a very high ceiling with a large fan that works well to circulate air and keep the house cool. You can see it in the header photo. It is little too rococo for my tastes, and like many appliances in our new home it needed to be repaired. I had the electrician come over on Thursday to fix it. The fan worked, but made an intermittent grinding, scraping noise that was maddening to listen to. Sometimes it was quiet, sometimes it wasn’t. It is also very high up, and there was no way we could check it out ourselves.

The electrician figured out that one of the blades was not flush and was making the scraping noise. He told us it needed a very thin shim to raise it up, and that he would “MacGyver” something to solve the problem. It was quite a process to take the globe and other internal parts off to get to the blade turning mechanism, and he did it while standing atop a very tall ladder. He intended to use a very small, thin piece of wood as a shim. He inadvertently broke off the tip of his screwdriver in his attempt to raise the blade mechanism to put in the shim. To his surprise the metal tip stayed under the blade and was exactly the size shim he needed to keep it from scraping. Now it runs really quietly.

I was able to wash out the glass globe before he reassembled the fan. It hadn’t been cleaned out for a very long time. The electrician couldn’t “MacGyver” how to change the direction the fan blades circled, but at least it is quiet.

What have you had to “MacGyver”? Broke many tools? Got ceiling fans?