Care and Maintenance of Your Chandelier

Care and Maintenance of Your Chandelier

You've been putting it off for weeks, months even. You look up at the masterpiece of a chandelier that adorns your dining room, and the glass crystal jewels in your once elegant, once brilliant chandelier have lost their luster. They no longer sparkle when you flip on the light. The dirt and grease and grime and gunk of the long winter months and hot summer days is starting to show on your beautiful lighting fixture. But you also realize that cleaning it could potentially be a major undertaking. You think about hiring or ordering one of your kids to do it, then realize that he'll break something if he's left with the glass alone for too long. So, then you decide to break down and grab a rag to clean it yourself. Okay, where do you start?

Plan out what you want to do first. You'll need a step ladder, a drop cloth, a bucket of fairly warm water, some mild detergent (what you use for dishes should be fine for the crystal jewels), metal polish and/or an all purpose cleaner, a drying towel, and a rag or two. Perhaps the quickest way of cleaning all of those pieces is to take them off the actual chandelier first and let them soak in the water. For glass crystals, you can use hotter water than if you have plastic crystals. Water is your friend and will take most of the elbow grease out of spending a lot of time cleaning them individually.

Now that the crystal pieces are soaking in the bucket of water, you have more free space to clean the stems and the metal. Be thorough. Clean the metal well. Step back and take a look at your job before you rehang the jewels. Take your time in this step as you don't want some family wise acre to remark, "you missed a spot." Now comes the fun part. With your rag, clean each jewel separately and place them on the towel. After you have a dozen or so, dry them individually so that they'll shine, then hang them (or wait to hang them altogether. You'll get more of a sense of accomplishment if you hang a few at a time.

By the time you're done with all of the pieces and have rehung them, your bucket of water should be thoroughly dirty. So, to prevent that kind of buildup from happening again, you need to spend two minutes a week dusting the chandelier. Do that and you'll keep the brilliance and sparkle of your glass crystals as well as the metal to the fixture. It'll look fresh and clean, like you have slaved over each individual jewel weekly. No one has to know your secret.