Allow Me To Shed Some Light...

Friends, how do we feel about pot lights?  I've always been on the fence and (probably a symptom of my job) they always remind me of finished basements with beige furniture.  Is anyone with me?

When it was time to think about lighting for the kitchen, I surprised myself by suggesting them to Corey.  You see, he had already installed all these fabulous cabinet and under cabinet lights and I didn't want some awkwardly retro-modern fixture that I rescued from Craigslist to detract from the clean vibe of our kitchen.  

Corey still has some patching to do (from running new electrical) but so far, I think I like them.

... And just to show you that I don't fully worship the god of neutral décor, guess what's back in our dining room!  I'll give you a hint- It solves a pet peeve I've had about the room since the day we moved in and it looked like this:

Give up?  Here it is:

No, it's not the painting.  I wrote about the painting here.  It's the light, which I wrote about here.

Remember when we had it in the condo?  I had loved it and it was one of the few things I actually cared for enough to move to our new/old house.  I remember our buyers had wanted it but I refused to give it up.

I know it's loud and maybe a little tacky but I just love it so much and now that it's up in the dining room (and the old fixture is sitting in a snowbank at the bottom of our driveway) the new/old house feels a teeny bit more like home.

Closet Lighting

Last week, I posted about Corey installing our closet doors.  Today, I'm sharing the second part of the project, which was installing lighting in out closet.

Remember, Corey and I still need to drywall over the frame... and now, we'll also have some holes to patch from the electrical work, but we're always a work in progress.

Here's the back of the closet frame, this is where Corey attached the fluorescent lighting.

I tried to get some decent pictures...

We seriously needed extra light in the room, and it would have been impossible to see our clothes without this update.  Here's our closet pre-doors.

 

... And here it is now!  The closet lighting actually works well as ambient light for our bedroom!

 

 

LET THERE BE LIGHT!  We're not getting too excited though.  There's still plenty of work to do, including this patching from running the wires.

 

In case you're wondering, that coiled wire is for Corey to run to the overhead light.  We thought we'd update everything at once.

Patching aside, we also now have a double switch!  When combined with the bedside lights that Corey installed in the summer, we'll finally have a bright bedroom with switches for the overhead light and closet beside the door, and separate switches and lights over each nightstand.  Woo hoo!

Related articles

• Hiding Our Closet
• Closet Woes
• A Secret Kids Room Through the Closet
• 5 Ways To Light Up Drawers with LEDs
• Hello, New Challenge! (Pictures of the House!!)

My Very Own Lindsay Adelman Chandelier

What did we do last night?  Oh, nothing... we just hung out and MADE OUR OWN LAMP!  No big deal, right? 

I found the idea online months ago and Corey looked at it and confirmed that he could wire it for me, so we ordered the supplies... Which have been sitting in a box for over a month while we worked on other areas of the house.

This is one of those projects that I have been dying to show you, but I wanted to wait until we were completely finished.  A special shout out to Corey for this one, who modified the original specs so it would be safer and who performed surgery on the lamp connected all the wires inside the tiny brass tubes at 11 o'clock at night because we were both so excited to see the finished product.

This project actually evolved from a trip to CB2 earlier this summer, where I was searching for this satellite pendant to (you guessed it) spray paint gold.

When I learned that this lamp was out of stock at CB2, I remembered that Corey and I prefer to buy vintage items or make them ourselves.  I learned about Lindsay Adelman chandeliers on Modernhaus.  They are fairly simple to make, but a bit of a challenge to wire correctly using proper gauge wire.  You can find the instructions here.

Here are some pictures of the lamp before Corey wired it.  The holes in the ceiling were from Corey updating the electrical work and have since been patched.:

 

Note: For safety reasons, (Corey felt more comfortable with thicker wiring, which would meet proper electrical codes.) we Corey modified the lamp slightly.  With proper wire, he was limited in the number of bulbs he could power through each individual branch.  We are thrilled with the finished product... especially against our new dark walls, so here it is:

 

And with the lights on:

 

In case you're curious, the industrial pendant we had hung in the living room will find a good home in our bedroom.  We still like it, but not as much as the Lindsay Adelman light!  We really love it!  What do you think?  Would you consider making your own?



Related articles

• New Life for an OLD Light
• Another Craigslist Score
• Fracken Lamps
• How Many Electricians Does it Take to Remove all the Knob and Tube Wiring from our House?
• Another Old Light (DIY Faux Aged Brass)

Fracken Lamps

Before I launch into today's post, I want to say that it was great to see so many members of my Crestwood family last night.  There wasn't much time to visit but perhaps we'll get a proper reunion soon. 

I also hope everyone managed to get home safely and stay dry from the flooding in Toronto last night.  We discovered that we may need to re-shingle our roof soon... oh joy!  We had some minor water coming through the ceiling upstairs but our basement was (thankfully) dry!  How did you fare?  Better than this guy, I hope!  (I'm sort of waiting for someone to make this a meme.)  Did any of you find that the harsh and prolonged rain exposed weaknesses in your house?

So, let's move on to today's post:  I am obsessed with scissor or accordion wall mounted lights.  I just love them!  I see vintage models on Etsy and eBay (like the lamp above) all the time, but a pair is rare to find.  The pair below had me swooning but $795 for a pair of bedside lamps is too rich for my blood!

Corey hated our bulky bedside lamps at the condo, (shown below) which were the wrong scale for the space.  I promised him that I would get rid of the bulky lamps in our new house so he could have wall mounted lamps.  You'll notice that, while I like decor and visually pleasing pieces, Corey prefers streamlined and practical.  We often compromise and meet in the middle.

For a long time, I was convinced we would make our own accordion style lamps like this one (below) from Ikea Hackers:

 

I had even planned our little DIY by choosing to make it by combining the Ikea Hektar Lamp and the Ikea Frack Mirror:  Hence the title of this post, which I began composing when this was still my plan.

  

There are great examples of similar projects all over the internet.  If you're interested, here's a good one.

We were 90% sure we were going to make these Ikea hack lamps (Okay, I was actually 99% certain.) ... until one day in May, when we stepped into Lowes and I took a quick trip down the lamp aisle.  We found these babies for $25 each and we both fell in love (or in serious like) instantly!

While I love a good DIY project, I am not a glutton for punishment.  (Corey says that's debatable...)A DIY only makes sense if it's actually cheaper or better than buying the real deal. 

In this case, we sacrificed my scissor arms for these fabulous wannabe Restoration Hardware lamps.  Honestly, can you see a big difference between our lamps and these Atelier Sconces (below) from Restoration Hardware? 

 

 ... Meh, the shape is slightly different but they're the same style and the price difference is about $175 each!

Anyway, I was excited not to have to DIY the lamps but, as I thought more and more about wall colour, I decided that the antique nickle finish wouldn't "pop" against the walls I had in mind.

I have something special in mind for our bedroom walls (Something fun!) and, by now you're probably noticing that I like gold and brass accents...

So I busted out my spray paint and painted both lights gold:

I love them!  What do you think?  I can't wait to paint the walls now.  It's funny how so many of our projects end up so different from my initial vision but I actually think these are perfect.

But, like everything in our house, we needed to wait until we actually had the time to complete the project.  While Corey and I tried to complete our living room bookshelves amidst our busy work schedules, these babies sat in a box at the back of the closet for weeks.

Well last night, like many Torontonians, I spent hours trying to find my way home through half flooded streets.  Imagine my surprise to find that Corey had installed my bedside light, a switch and a new outlet below my nightstand!  Now I can read in bed without waking him!  He even took a "during picture" for me to post:  (Cue the "awww" sounds!)

We need to touch up the hole around the switch with a little plaster and Corey still needs to finish his own side but here's a peek at my new light:

It's not my accordion lamp but I think I like it just as much.  The head pivots so I can still adjust the light and I think I love that it's pretty compact.  I think it's finally time for me to start really unpacking my books.  I've been missing them!  What are you reading this summer?

Related articles

• New Life for an OLD Light
• 8 Pendants, and How to Hang 'Em
• DIY Concrete Pendant Lamp - Brit + Co
• Etsy Crush: Printwork

New Life for an OLD Light

We fell in love with this vintage industrial pendant light from Craigslist before we moved to our condo.  We loved it so much that we drove out to Oshawa to pick it up and, we discovered that by chance, it was the same seller who had sold us our director's chairs just a few weeks earlier.  Too funny!

We loved the look of this large vintage lamp with the worn patina and we decided to hang it in our bedroom.  This lamp, along with our dining room chandelier were the only light fixtures we did not include in the sale of our condo because we thought we could use them in our next home.  To be honest, my main reason for not including the pendant is because I assumed our buyers would think it was hideous and, since we actually DO like it, I thought this 60-80 year old lamp should spend retirement in our little old house being enjoyed!

The other day, the giant bulb burned out so we decided to visit Home Depot for a new one.  We have often complained that the huge bulb receptacle... or maybe it's the socket... (Corey's either going to be impressed that I know that word, or tell me that I'm butchering electrical terms when he reads this later.) limited us to huge, industrial bulbs that made our bedroom so bright that it felt like an institution... Not exactly the ambiance we were going for in the bedroom!

Anyway, we took the bulb burning out two weeks before our move to be a sign that maybe it was time to take another look at our pendant light.  We spoke with a great sales associate at Home Depot who was really interested in the age of our light and suggested that we think of a bulb that will compliment the vintage element of our lamp.

We bought an adaptor so that we would no longer be constrained by the size of the receptacle and looked at some Marconi Light Bulbs.

The great thing about the vintage style Edison/Marconi tungsten filaments is that they mimic vacuum tubes used in classic radios and produce a warm, glow.  The shape of the bulb even has a retro vibe!  Here it is in our lamp with the new Marconi bulb.

Not a huge different but here's a picture of the bulb in action.

Much more WOW factor!  In hindsight, the 40 Watt bulb may not be strong enough for the bedroom and we may need to graduate to a 60 Watt.  We're going to wait and see though, since we're actually not sure where this lamp will end up in our new home.

This brings us to the second part of our lamp makeover:  I'm thinking of painting it.  I'm still not positive, since it would lose some of the "vintage industrial" character, but I'm thinking of hanging this lamp either in our living room or kitchen and I think both rooms may require a more polished look.

Recently, I've been seeing similar styled industrial pendants all over the pages of decor magazines and I'm starting to feel like a "fresh coat of paint" (cheesy, but I couldn't resist) would breathe some new life into this old girl.  Here are some pictures which inspire me:

This metallic lamp looks clean but retains the industrial look because of the metal.  I've seen lovely chrome lamps too but I think I'd like a warmer metal like copper or gold in our next home...

While this room is not my taste, I admire this blue pendant which is similar in shape to ours.  I'm hoping to incorporate some more blue in our next house and the bright colour is quite unexpected here.

 

   

While the lamp is a different shape, the ombre painted shade is very chic!  I could see myself doing something like this but I am also conscious that this trend may not last much longer.

I love this grouping of black and white painted pendants in a kitchen.  Even if they were not identical in shape, the paint could tie them together nicely and they look very clean in a kitchen.

I also love the idea of metallic paint on the inside of the lamp.  I think this would warm the light and make for some lovely ambiance.

 

I haven't decided exactly what I'll do or where I'll put the lamp yet but I think it's safe to say that I'll probably use a bold colour with (maybe) some metallic accents.

 

If anyone cares to join me in updating some industrial lights, this pair of shades is currently available on Toronto kijiji for $50 each. 

 

 

Related articles

• Having Fun With Lighting: 6 Cool Pendant Lamps Under $350
• Trend Spotting: Bare Bulbs
• Cluny High, Aalto Low