Turning Misfortune into an Awesome New Lamp

I've got a quick lamp update we took on over the weekend I wanted to share the end results from here on the blog...

Basically, we had a brass task lamp with a green glass shade we use for a bedside table lamp in the master bedroom — it's similar to the style below, except the green glass shade was more conical than wide like this example (this pic is all we could find on Google Image Search that resembled the lamp we started with):

It had been a lamp of Mary's and was a little past it's prime in that the electrical socket holding the bulb and glass shade in place was loose and unstable. This might be why the green glass shade already had a big "glued back together" crack in it that was just turned to the side nobody can see when Mary brought it over to the house (#thatsmygirl).

Having an electrical background, the loose socket and broken shade were always in the back of my mind, but never enough to actually fix it right away — you know, one of those projects you think you'll get to eventually but it always seems to stay on the back burner? Well, it wasn't until that loose socket and Mary's endearingly clumsy nature finally did this lamp in when she knocked it over and shattered the glass shade (and bulb) for good. We were both so distracted with cleaning up the mess at the time that we didn't stop to take pics, so you'll have to use your imagination on this one, sorry!

All of this back-story is to show how we (and you could too) took our lamp misfortune and turned it into something we liked even better than what we had in the first place.

When we were left with the remains of the lamp looking like this, it was easy to start over from the beginning with a clean slate. The shape is great on this lamp, right?

After a quick trip to the hardware store, we were back home armed with a new lamp socket, new clear glass shade and new filament bulb to see if we could whip this baby back into shape with a whole new look.

We both liked the idea of trying out a filament bulb to give the lamp a more industrial and vintage vibe.

So, I just twisted out the old broken/loose socket and replaced it with the new one:

Then I slipped the new glass shade in and twisted the socket nut from the inside to secure the shade to the fixture.

Guess what — it's not loose anymore!

 

With a quick twist of the filament bulb within the shade, we had a brand new lamp!

 

Here it is back by the bedside, fitting in even better than before:

And with the lights out:

That's how we turned a little clumsy misfortune into an updated lamp we like even better than the original version we had before. Have you made any little updates with a big impact or finally gotten to one of those back burner projects you've had on your mind for months?

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