Hallway lighting in an English Tudor House

We live in an English Tudor house, with steeply pitched roof, well-formed dormers on all sides, nice attic space upstairs, and, of course, dim entry and hallways. The decorative candlelight-like bulbs installed in the ceiling fixtures in the hallways appeared to be burning out all the time, seemingly faster than we can replace them.

This dimly-lit condition changed over a summer weekend in early August. We added 2 regular light sockets to each fixture and started to use energy saving bulbs (i.e., florescent tube packaged on top of a lamp socket) wherever possible around the house. A 60-watt equivalent bulb burns only 14 watts of electricity, significantly lower than the single 25-watts candlelight bulb (and we need 3 of those in each fixture). As it turned out we only needed 1 14-watt bulb in each fixture to brighten the hallway, for we have 2 fixtures in each of the 3 hallways.

We also put socket adapters into the lighting fixture hanging down in the staircase. The screw-on adapter allows conversion from a candlelight socket to regular. The staircase is now as light at night as in the day when natural light comes in from a skylight we installed 3-4 years ago.

Presently regular-shaped energy saving bulbs (60-watt equiv. with spiral tube) are sold at a little over $2 each in Home Depot ($1 per, if on sale, $1.25 each from Costco in an 8-pack). The bulbs in decorative shapes (e.g., balls and candlelights with small sockets) are still a bit pricey (at around $6-$7) and relatively hard to find.

A bit installation detail here. Each socket was installed horizontally tilting slightly downward. A brass coupling, about 3/8 inch long, was inserted on top of the socket's extra metal attachment clip. The socket is secured to the top, with a 1-in bolt threaded up into the fixture's top plate and locked down with a nut from above. Taking all 6 fixtures down was easy, but putting them back up was a bit of a pain, because it was hard to locate the holes for the 2 bolts from underneath. There must be a less painful way to find bolt holes from underneath the fixture plate, other than trial-and-error or marking a line on the ceiling.