Yummy Lamp

In my blog-hopping, I came across this post at The Painted Hive which shows this great idea for making a lamp base out of a music stand:

Awesome idea, and so well staged.  My house does not look like this.

Cut to last summer.  Some friends were having a multi-family yard sale and there (among a large number of other things I had to take home with me) was my perfectly patina'd, old school music stand.  For $1.  Sigh - diy love....

I knew I could buy a $12 lamp kit to wire my baby up, but I also knew my local ReStore (yes we have a ReStore in my small area!) had tons of electrical parts.

I asked the guy at the ReStore what parts I needed.  (I couldn't be bothered to figure this out on my own, apparently.)  He confidently walked over to the electrical section and then, after a little umming and ahhing, said that I should just buy a used lamp from the home furnishings section of the ReStore.  (...which is really a thrift store.  Does your ReStore have a home furnishings section?)

So, dutifully off I went and found a little boring/borderline ugly lamp for $3.

When I sat down to ravage the little lamp for parts, I found out that it is one of those "touch" lamps, where you can touch the metal to turn it on and off.  Which meant I had to evade some other wiring and set it aside until I come up with a scenario in which I need touch sensitive lighting...  Hmmm...  On the front door knob?  The kitchen faucet?  Oh my, so many ideas...

I won't go through the details of wiring my music stand, because that is sooooo 2011.  A ton of people have documented this already, including Kristine at The Painted Hive.

However she lives in Australia, so I am including this link using North American wiring, by one of my favorite bloggers, Mandi at Vintage Revivals, entitled Lamp Surgery 101.  And while you're there, do yourself a favor and check out her Project Graveyard.  This woman is endlessly creative.

(I've done a hell of a lot of linking in this post, huh?)

ANYway...  once the simple wiring was done, I added a $15 linen drum lampshade and now have this:

See?  Told you my house didn't look like that. Not that there's anything wrong with that.  Also this is a bad phone camera  picture because I could not find my nice awesome camera for the life of me.  So you get the phone shot.  Of course, now that I'm sitting down to write this post, I can see the camera from here.  Sigh. 

I am very happy with my new $20 lamp, which stands about 3-1/2 feet tall.  And I really needed the lighting in the living room.  I thought the gold cord coming out the bottom would bug me, but it really doesn't.  If I change my mind, I might put some pewter Rub 'n' Buff on it.

I think this lamp is a good example of my current ideas about redoing The Red Dollar House.  I want to re-use and update pieces that have age, texture and compelling lines.  And I want to do it on a bargain hunter's budget.



(Extra points if you now know what schuhplattler means...)
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