apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

I have a similar fixture from IKEA hanging in my kitchen.

Perfect height for me (I"m 5'9") - but now I'm dating a guy who is 6'6" and every time he comes for a visit, he hits his head on the thing.

I'm either going to have to raise the thing before his next visit or get a shorter boyfriend...

please raise the damn light fixture, hell get him to do it!

I bump my head on the pots in my MIL's kitchen everytime I visit. She raised them a bit after her sons got so tall but still everyone but her has to duck. Its so friggin annoying!

Its a shame that your electrician was so careless.

Something similar happened to me, but it was a cast glass bottom to an antique fixture. It just missed me by inches. It was in a theatre and lucky that it happened during a rehearsal.

The light fixture in my goddaughter's bedroom fell down. Lucky she wasn't in her room playing at the time.

About a month ago I helped my upstairs neighbor install his new HUGE flat screen over the fireplace mantle. The next morning my husband and I woke up to a massive crashing sound, and tons of cursing. It was nauseating. BUT.... I went up a little later (gingerly) to see what had gone wrong, and it turns out that he had been standing on his kitchen counter in socks and slipped. The damage to his rib, elbow, and tap weren't pretty but about 2 grand cheaper to fix. He and the TV are totally fine now.

Why do things like that always fall at night though?

My neighbor told me that her kitchen cabinets fell completely off the wall in the middle of the night. Can you even imagine that noise? And mess - broken dishes everywhere! Eeek.

On a similar note, I had a canine visitor last year for a weekend and one of my cats was pretty freaked out about it. Around six in the morning, he (cat) tore through the house and ended up sliding - full speed - into an arrangement of bottles (wine, etc) I had set up. He broke a bunch of them but didn't hurt himself. It was a craZy way to wake up.

I usually tie or safety wire my hanging light fixtures into the electrical box, in addition to the fixture anchor screws. It wouldn't have helped with your glass globe falling down, but it will help safeguard the fixture itself.

I had a glass globe fall the other day....I was sure the cat had broken something, but it was just gravity.

It was in my laundry area and boy was there glass EVERYWHERE! But I can say that my washer and dryer (and the entire area around them) has never been so clean!

I spent an hour one day putting up a shelf for candles in my bathroom ... measuring, checking the level, putting in anchors, etc.

Literally 5 minutes after I put it up, lined up a bunch of glass candle holders on it, and marveled at my work, I started cleaning the shower and reached over to the wall to steady myself and ... pulled that shelf right down and out of the wall with all the candles crashing down to the floor.

To this day I can't believe how stupid that was.

A friend and I had decided to prune a large-ish tree branch about 10' off the ground. I was on the ground and he used the ladder to sit astride a nearby branch.

Everything was fine until the branch was sawn through--instead of falling down like we expected, the cut end flew up and over -- wham! It hit about one inch away from turning my friend Henry to Henrietta. Needless to say major tree pruning is now left to professionals!

I had a $29 ceiling fixture fall onto my $600 solid ash coffee table. Glass shards cut into the wood. Now it wears a runner that changes with the seasons, but I'm still mad.

Back in college, I had an old bookshelf stuffed with books and trinkets in my bedroom. One night I woke up at 3 a.m. I looked around and wondered what woke me but everything seemed fine. No sooner did I close my eyes to go back to sleep when that entire shelf come crashing down, books and all. Just as the last trinket broke and the last book thumped, the phone rang. I sat in bed so confused as to what was going on. It was such a twightlight moment! In the end, the shelf was old and overloaded and the phone was just a friend who was out at a bar and wanted to say hi (because that seems like a normal thing to do when you drink too many beers --ha!).

This doesn't count, but it's funny..

Years ago my sister held Christmas at her house and to maximize space, she put her tree in this cute sunporch off her living room, but positioned right in the doorway so everyone could see it. Halfway through the evening more people arrived and we needed more chairs. She had said to me several times, "Don't try to go around the tree, they won't fit. Go through the backdoor instead," but of course, it was cold and snowy, and I just thought, heck, this is a light sunporch chair, I'll lift it up over my head and...

And I got it stuck on the tree, the tree fell on my back and there I was stuck in the doorway with a chair above my head and a tree on my back!

Luckily nothing major was damaged and she laughed that I was so dumb; and I was sufficiently shamed that from now on I actually listen when people tell me things... well, mostly.

In our last apartment, one of our kitchen cabinets fell off the wall. We had just finished dinner at our tiny kitchen table and were sitting nearby on the sofa when, BANG, the cabinet fell off the wall, hit the table, and then landed on the floor. A few minutes earlier and my husband and I could have been hurt. Fortunately, there were no breakables in there.

Long but good (I think).

I gutted my house when I bought it. I was trying to save money so I was doing all the painting myself. After my electrician finished the wiring, my contractor had his nephew install my new light fixtures on a Friday. I called him to ask if it was OK for me to paint the bathroom that weekend and he said go for it. After lying out in my bikini, I went home to paint. I was barefoot in cut-off shorts and a bikini top when I moved the bathroom vanity out of the way – I stood up behind it and all of a sudden I am like hummm…I can’t move and my jaw is clenching…and why does everything look blue? The next thing I remember is waking up across the floor against the side wall. The “nephew” hadn’t finished installing the fixture on the bathroom wall and forgot to re-cap the wires. The wires had hit my sweaty head all at once. I had been electrocuted. I found out later that if I hadn’t been sweaty and barefoot, it probably wouldn’t have happened.

My downstairs neighbor came running up – she heard a loud bang and thought something might be wrong. I had blood in my mouth from where I bit my tongue, scrapes on my elbows from where I fell and what looked like burn marks down my spine. I looked insane but really didn’t feel that bad – My neighbor made me go to the hospital just in case. I went to a teaching hospital where I was the patient de jour for a while. I had a least 3 different groups of doctors and students come in to talk to me at different times (all this in a bikini mind you). They made me spend the night to see if I had nerve damage. Other then the exit wound scars, it looks like no scary side effects (except for the ability to read minds and move things just by thinking about them).

Anyway, I am fine now and no, I didn’t sue my contractor. I was desperate to get my place finished and the thought of finding another contractor was scarier then being electrocuted.

Used a 3M command strip & hook to hold a Christmas wreath over a mantle. I was sure I let it sit long enough, but when we came home we found glass from a large hurricane lamp filled with glass Christmas balls. I was very sad :-( I use 3M strips everywhere, so the mystery remains: was the wall dirty? do 3M strips not work on plastered brick? did I not let it sit long enough? What went wrong?!

The metal mini blinds in our living room came crashing down in the middle of the night last year, scaring the sh*t out of us. They just fell the other day again, although this time during the day while we were gone.

They were initially installed by some handyman and then rehung by one of our building's maintainence people... I think this time, I'll just do it myself!

Last week, I was awakened at 3:50am to the sound of my cat knocking a very large mirror off of my high dresser. Somehow he managed to get the wire off the hooks in the wall and sent it flying. The other cat (who was asleep on my chest at the time) went flying as I sat up and screamed.

Ugh. I seriously thought that someone was breaking in my windows or something.

Upon just moving into our old apartment, I was standing in the kitchen putting dishes away, and the globe from the light fixture above me (thankfully, not directly above me) just fell. Right next to me. It was one of those ceiling mounted fixtures with the thick-glass globe (thick enough it didn't break when it hit the floor) that is held in place by a little screw-in finial thingy at the bottom.

Luckily the cats were out of harm's way also. It just stopped me cold, staring at my fiance.

That could've done some damage.

I'm suprised that nobody's mentioned the earthquake having dislodged the globe...