Thursday, April 28, 2011

One step forward, two steps back...

I hope this isn’t an indication of how this project is going to proceed.

This room will be my first electrified room box so I’ve been looking through my stash to see what lighting fixtures I will use. There were already a couple that I had thought I would use then I remembered a pair of floor lamps I got at a club giveaway. If they work I could even try turning one into a table lamp. The style is good but the shades are orange which won’t exactly go with my pink/rose colour scheme. LOL

First on the agenda: test to see if they even work! Glitch #1 – they have weird plugs with very thick prongs that won’t fit into my power strip. Fortunately I have some a supply of new plugs in my stash. Replace the plug on one lamp and YES it works!

Not much sense worrying about changing the plug on the other one until I figure out what to do with the shades. First possible solution is to try painting one with Gallery Glass which I fortunately have in ruby red. First coat is terribly streaky but I’ll try another coat after that dries and see how it looks then. Second coat looks good so on to the other lamp.

As you can see, the lamp upright is a small brass tube covered with brass beads. Since I want the second lamp to be a table lamp, I’m cutting the tube to about 1 ½”.

The tube is too small to use my tube cutter so I simply cut it with my wire cutters. Bad move! Why do we always remember tips after the fact? Using the wire cutters pinched the tubing and misshaped it. I should have put a piece of wire as large as would fit through the tubing then cut through them both - the wire would have kept the tubing from going out of shape. Too late, smart!

With a bit of fiddling I managed to repair the damage, put the upright in the stand and add the beads.
In the meantime, I've given the shade two coats of Gallery Glass and it's ready to work with. (I used the other part of the cut upright as a handle while painting the shade and stuck it into the edge of a piece of foamcore to hold it while drying.)
Time to reassemble everything. The bulb goes in the shade and the wires fed through a hole in the bottom of the shade.
The wires then go through the brass tube and out through the hole in the side of the base. 



I think they look pretty darn good - especially since this is the first time I've tried anything like this. I'm not going to replace the plug on the table lamp at this time because (I should have seen this coming) I've decided not to use these lamps in this particular room box!

Haven't decided just where they'll end up but the colour is just too strong for what I'm planning. 

So plan B is to use these lamps. The Tiffany style lamp was a possibility but now have decided against it too so it'll be the two brass lamps with white shades.

Now the electrical is decided, it's time to start preparing the room itself. 

No comments:

Post a Comment