We're Fan Fans

I thought I'd steal a quote from one of my favourite blogs Young House Love, who proudly declare that they're fan fans (while removing all of their ceiling fans from their house), as the title for this post.

As you know, now that the ceiling is done in the master bedroom, I've immediately moved on to decorating the room in my head. One of the things I've been focusing is on things that will hang from the ceiling - namely fans and lights. As you can see, the current arrangement is not the prettiest (by the way I have actually removed that blue painters tape from around the edges of the ceiling finally).

And I recently waxed lyrical about my plans for the lighting and cooling in the room (see here). In that post, I said I wanted to position a fan like the one below directly over the bed, a bit different to the current old and battered fan's position off to the side. On that topic, how anyone could have ever thought that was a sensible plan is beyond me. That is almost the very least useful place in the room for it, other than perhaps directly over the door to the room.

 

To be specific, this fan is the Hunter Pacific Majestic Little Bay fan in white. It has that tropical-ish feel with the large fan-shaped blades that make it a bit more interesting and unique than your standard purely functional boring fan. It also has a significantly heftier price tag. After a bit of internet trawling I found it at Buyster

$345. Ouch. Plus, unless we want to have to jump up and down on the bed in order to pull that little dangling handle to turn the thing on and off (remember our ceilings are 3.2m high), we need to buy a remote and a receiver so we can operate it from the ground. So add on a casual $69 for the receiver, and about $49 for the remote. So now our grand total for this fan (including Buyster's delivery fee of $10) is $473. Double ouch!

Of course, I moved on. I then found it at Oz Lighting.

Although the picture isn't white, you can see that the colour on the right is white. Oh and wonder of wonders, the price is $258.50! Plus, over on the right where I've circled it in red, you get free delivery on all orders over $200! Happy day. But then the inevitable 'extras' come in. OzLighting have their receiver at $60.50, and their cheapest remote at $27.50. So we're still talking a total price of $346.50. Not bad given that that's only $1.50 more than Buyster's price for the fan alone!

On Buyster's listing, they have a little baby link next to the price like this:

So I clicked on it, sent them the link to the OzLighting option, just to see whether they were willing to try to beat their price. No luck, I'm afraid. They responded almost immediately with their lowest price of $300

Just to be thorough, I decided to call the shop that we got all of our lights for our second house from, Discount Lighting, to see what they could do. They don't ordinarily stock the fan, but can apparently get it in, and quoted me a price of $260 for the fan, and $70 for the receiver and remote. $330 total. Winner! Plus, we can actually deal with people and get some kind of in-store warranty.

We patted ourselves on the back quite comfortably for having found a competitive option, and filed that away to be ordered when we get a bit closer to needing it.

And then I hopped on Ebay. And guess what I found?

Price of $250, free postage, unique-looking design (although not white, which is not ideal), all sounding great.

And then I saw these words in the description:

-  Remote control, wall mounting bracket & receiver included.

Cha-Ching!!! Not only does it also come with a light (which would have been yet another added extra with the other one, but it includes a remote control and a receiver! Sold.

Obviously there is an added risk in buying it from a private seller (who is posting it from South Australia, albeit via courier) that it might not work and we could get burned, but I have a good feeling about this.

I'm in two minds about the colour of the blades. Do we keep them that colour? They may actually blend in fairly nicely with the colour of the ceiling (kind of...maybe), or do we paint them? Apparently they're made out of plastic, so technically they shouldn't be too hard to cover in a couple of coats of paint and we'll have ourselves a lovely, unique, and cheap fan.

We have time to make that decision, and I believe the blades are supposed to be fairly easy to remove, so we can live with it for a little while and make up our minds which direction we want to go.

I'm excited!