Miracles rarely start out as home improvement projects. You usually have to have someone from the Bible around, or at least a saint or two to make those impossible dreams come true. But we bucked the trend at our place just last week.

After 12 years in the same house, things start to leave formation. So I gathered the whole family around and announced that we were all going to embark on a fix-it campaign. I wanted everything in the house put back in line. Like the faucet in the downstairs bathroom that was missing a handle on one side for the last few years (ever since I installed it). And the vinyl floor in the laundry room where the dog dug a hole so that he could bury my checkbook. But most of all, the chandelier in the dining room that dropped down a few feet from the ceiling one day so that it could bonk people on the head when they walk by and stop you from playing miniature pool on Friday nights.

It did look good on the walk-through before we signed the papers to buy our house. Everything looked good that day. When we came in the front door, angels swept past us to the dining room and danced on that chandelier. It shone like a beacon in a brass ring. Light reflected off the facets in the glass and played on the freshly painted walls like an invitation to the heavenly host.

But after we signed the mortgage, the angels moved to another new house and left behind a 1,000-pound lighting fixture in the middle of a 10 x 10 room. Before long, the chandelier dropped down halfway to the floor like Quasimodo ringing the bell in the Notre Dame, but without the music.

And that's where it stayed for the next 10 years.

Getting it down off the ceiling wasn't too difficult. I just got out the stepladder, unscrewed a few bolts, and stuck my head underneath the thing to break its fall.

But now the question was, what to do with this chandelier. My first thought was to give it to charity, but when the guys in the pickup truck came around, they sailed right past it and made rude catcalls like they were standing up a blind date. So the chandelier sat in the corner of our garage for a week looking like a Cinderalla with two missing slippers.

Then one day my wife and I noticed one of those big dumpsters down the street in front of a neighbor's house. It had a sign on the side that said "Absolutely no Chandeliers," but that didn't stop us.

We waited until dark, and nonchalantly slipped down the sidewalk with the chandelier, like we were just out for a constitutional after supper and couldn't find the dog, so decided to rip the chandelier off the ceiling and walk that instead.

We got all the way to the edge of the dumpster, when some friendly neighbors pulled out of their driveway and shone their headlights on the two of us holding the chandelier. And for one magical moment it was like the angels returned. The chandelier lit up like a searchlight at a Hollywood premier so that the neighbors could take a few snapshots.

Seizing the initiative, I yelled out over the noise of the car engine to see if our neighbors could spare any of those candle kind of light bulbs that fit in chandeliers, and helped my wife hoist the whole thing up a bit higher so that they could see that we were sincere.

When word got around that we pulled a broken chandelier from the dumpster and fixed it with nothing but a few new light bulbs, our picture ended up in the community newspaper along with a story about our heroic recycling efforts. We don't mind the good publicity, but hold off on those donations, please. We've already got plenty of used chandeliers in the garage. And there are only so many angels to go around.