The unexpected joy of replacing ~400 lightbulbs
What date night looks like when you manage 18 acres worth of lanterns
To manage an estate is to manage all of its lights. And we have 340 exterior fixtures alone, which range from small flower-shaped lanterns (quantity 65) to our massive, diamond-covered chandelier. And yes, I counted.
Part of my job as manager is to walk the winding pathways and hunt for half-broken things. A lightbulb or lantern is almost always one of those things. If you can forgive my nonsensical shorthand, the current triage list reads as follows: three garden cement, four garden metal, four backroad black, six bridal pathway dangling, five driveway black. These are either lights that need replacing or lights that are no longer working and still stumping our electricians. (As a reminder: this is a fifty-year old labyrinthine property built mostly of brick and cement, so wires, plumbing, etc. run deep and are often hard to find, let alone operate on). But there are many burnt out bulbs I can replace, and many more incandescent ones the original owner used, which we are slowly swapping out for LED.
It makes a great date night.
Dylan and I start in the driveway, because here the lights turn on every night at sunset, so need replacing most often. They are also the only lights out of ~400 that are on an automatic timer, (making another goodly chunk of my job flipping the many switches). There are 62 lanterns alone in the front two acres where the house, yard and first rose garden sit.
I find a hidden lantern hitherto unknown in this area, completely swallowed in Ivy. I clear it out to find the interior corroded past the point of rehabilitation. I dress it back in Ivy and add it to my triage list.
We spend twenty minutes cleaning lesser corrosion off several other light bulb sockets, before finally googling what’s the best way to clean corrosion from light bulb sockets because up till now, we’d been using pliers in what Dylan called, “The worst game of operation ever.” (Answer: sandpaper and isopropyl alcohol).
We move to the outdoor kitchen area and replace one hanging lantern bulb that wasn’t on my list. We have one more question for our techno overlords, and at this point my grammar is wine-tainted: why dos a light that on flicker off when tightened? Google understood of course, and told us to pull the metal tab up so the lightbulb could have full contact. (It worked.)
This hanging lantern pictured below was not cooperative however, and no matter how much we pulled and tugged, the base would not disconnect from the top. Added to the triage list as a return-to-later project.
Dylan has a theory that, like himself, the original owner and builder of this property, Bob, must have been a night owl. Because to build an estate like this with your bare hands in a mere few decades must’ve meant you were working every day, all day. But that left no time to enjoy the place except for at night, which is the best time to enjoy it anyhow. Bob knew how to set the mood, that’s for sure. The lights are low and warm-toned and some are covered in leaves (like the one I mentioned before) and the light behind them acts as an x-ray, highlighting every gossamer vein and glowing, green pore.
It’s partly why we do these walks at night. Easier to spot the broken bulbs yes, but mainly, because it’s beautiful.
We move to the gardens, and it is here I am also typically collecting hidden debris from past events. Tonight - a champagne cork, a set of plastic silverware, 2 cups, a small box that probably once held decor. I add them to my basket, which already contains our wine bottle, pliers, old bulbs, new bulbs, a phone. We crawl through the bushes and plants to grab trash or check or change the lanterns. Enter; the spiders, who cast “creepy little shadows” as Dylan calls them while I shine my phone camera into their homes.
We reminisce about the years before we started dating, to our decade + long friendship. We like to play the game of imagining when we met, two cups of wine full and lantern-lit and glowing. It goes kind of like this: when do you think it was exactly? and I feel like it must’ve been in middle school and no, I think it was when I came to your house with Nolan and Jeremy and I probably tried to say hi and you probably just ignored me.
Then he scoops me up and I drop my basket.
“I may not know exactly when I met you,” he says, “Just that I’ve loved you as long as I can remember.”
So he’s loved me since probably the sixth or seventh time we saw each other, we decide.
All in all there are over a dozen different types of original light fixtures, with the black street lamps making up almost 150 in total. Our green metal lanterns and cement lanterns make up another 137 combined. Hanging chandeliers and a few other miscellaneous make up the rest. And the market lights we added line our fences and stairs and float above our reception court and aggregate to nearly two thousand feet.
What this looks like logistically on any given event night - A thirty minute walk to the 21 individual breaker boxes within the property, and flipping nearly double that amount of switches (37 to be exact). And again in reverse, sometime around 1 am when we put the estate to bed.
In our 2.5 hour date night we change fourteen light bulbs, fix two more, trip one breaker, kiss a dozen times, drink too much wine, etc. On the edges of the property, there are still a few beheaded lanterns that no one sees. Ah well, on a distant someday, not today, we will walk again and repair them.