Bright Idea!

I have been wanting another lamp for our living room. Have you checked out the price of lamps recently?? They run anywhere from $15-$50 and up. And that doesn't include the shade which costs about the same. So the cheapest you can walk about with a brand new light is $30. 

Unless you go to Goodwill!! For less than $4 I picked this up. Luke is helping me get it right ;)

Since we don't have really great thrift stores here in town I usually stop by a Goodwill when I run to Buford for my "stock up" trips. They have an entire wall of lights with light bulbs that you can test right there in the store. There's nothing more frustrating than getting home and realizing it doesn't work!

I had to put my brain to work for this one- I really had NO IDEA there were different types of lamps/shades. 

This particular light has a "harp". That's the little round metal thing that goes above and around the light bulb. I assumed that's what all lights looked like (and that was the only kind at the thrift store). 

The screw at the top holds the shade to the light. The technical term for that is a "finial". Didn't know you were getting a vocabulary lesson did you??

The problem I ran into was all the shades I looked at/liked didn't have a place to put the finial. I didn't realize that you could easily remove the harp and attach other types of shades in a little under .5 seconds. 

All I did was lift up that cover and expose this:

When you squeeze the harp together it snaps right off.

(by the way walmart sells those suckers separately!!- yard sale!)

The drum shade I wanted attached to the outside ring of the lightbulb stand. voila! You don't even have to screw anything together. The lightbulb holds it in place.  (you can also see where the harp was removed).

You can tell from the pictures that this light got sprayed a beautiful shade of blue! Krylon makes almost a perfect match to our living room blue!

Here's the finished product. The shade cost right around $15. So for less than $22 (that includes the price of paint) I got a brand new light! Horray for thrift stores!

Here it is in the room:

I really like that there is no "finial" sticking up out of the top! An extra bonus is this light is 3-way (dim, middle, bright) if I put in a 3 way light! Score!