When you spend your days surrounded by lighting products, it’s hard not to want to fix all of the ugly lights out there. We found this plain and simple lamp at a garage sale this past weekend, and said to ourselves “hey, I think I could make that better.”
This lamp had a few things going for it. Its simple shape left us with limitless possibilities when it came time to give it a makeover. It is almost an unspoken rule of DIY makeovers that the first step is to paint it (whatever that may be) white. The white base color would allowed us to give the lamp a special pop of color. We knew we wanted to showcase our fabric covered lamp wire. This meant rerouting the cord from its original path hidden within the base of the lamp, to making it go down the center of the lamp base. We merely drilled a hole in the center of the bottom of the base of the lamp, and deepened the existing light cord channel to meet the new hole we drilled. We were able to utilize majority of the existing lamp pieces, only needing to purchase a two-prong plug and the internal socket component from our local hardware store.
- Wire Stripper
- Screwdriver
- Neon Yellow Paracord
- White Lacquer Paint
- 3/8 drill bit
- 2-conductor plug
- 10’ Black and White ZigZag Cord
- Drill
We decided that we were going to use our Black and White ZigZag fabric covered light cord to give some visual interest while letting our neon yellow accent color take center stage. While out and about gathering our DIY supplies, we picked up a pair of $1 kids toys and thought that they were the something extra this lamp needed. We weren’t sure whether or not to go with godzilla or the elephant, so we figured we would let them battle it out, once they got their new neon paint job.
After a gruesome battle of epic proportions and in a shocking twist, the elephant beat out godzilla. His prize? A hole drilled through his body and to be displayed proudly in the center of our incredible lamp. After having the cord run through the lamp base and the belly of the elephant it was time to wire it. We decided to experiment with pull chain socket innards so we could swap out the chain with neon yellow paracord for another pop of our accent color. Our socket and plug were both 2-conductor, but our ZigZag cord is 3-conductor, so we simply clipped the ground wire and left it unused while wiring the lamp.
Our elephant lamp had this contemporary and worldly flair, that we felt looked great with World Effect’s Perahu reclaimed boat teak accent table. We love the way our lamp makeover turned out, and hope you do to! Share with us your lighting makeovers and stay tuned for our next lamp makeover.
