Lamp drama

WHY oh why do I torture myself. Lamps. Lamps are a struggle for me. For ages, I have been using the un-stylish (no offense if you use them), ultra bright and functional torchiere lamps. $20 from home depot and they light up the whole room. Perfect (or so I thought). I agreed with my ever so stylish sister that it was time to up the style on my living room lighting. The goal, low budget, stylish, & functional. Seems easy enough, right?! Wrong. Ha!

All of the pretty floor lamps that I love are upwards of $250 dollars. Even if they are on sale they are still too $$$. Anyway, I will spare you a lot of reading and just say, I struggled finding what I was looking for. I ended up at 2 budget friendly places - Target & Ikea. The drama with these places is that the Ikea lamps ONLY go with the IKEA shades. And the Target lamps pretty much ONLY go with the target shades. Not all lamp parts are created equal. Lesson learned (after many back and forths to each store with squirly kids in tow).

Here are the before pictures of the lamps/shades that I ultimately ended up with:

Black table lamp base on clearance at Target for $17.49 and Target Shade $15

Floor Lamp base from Ikea $30 and Ikea shade $20 (with plastic wrap still on)

So far, so good. Not completely over the moon stylish, but basic, clean, and not un-stylish in any way.

I decided to give them a makeover to fit in better with the decor in my living room. I never really spray paint "new" things, so I must admit it was a little unnerving to spray paint something that I just spent decent money on (not a $5 thrift store lamp like in the past). Ok - enough talking, wanna see the after??!

Table lamp:

I went for the "gold dipped" look to coordinate with the gold frames and other gold accents in my living room.

This may not be for you, but I am a gold lover and this lamp makes me soooo happy :)

In order to get the gold dipped look, I simply spray painted the lamp white. Then, because I am so impatient, I didn't want to wait a whole day to be able to tape it off and spray the bottom half gold. So, after the white dried for about an hour, I tightly wrapped a paper towel around the lamp, and then taped over the paper towel (so none of the sticky tape was on the semi-fresh white paint). Then, I sprayed the bottom half gold and immediately removed the paper towel/tape combo. The result ended up looking "dipped" because the paint soaked through the paper towel a bit and made the line of the gold less sharp than a tape line. I think it looks cool. See - impatience sometimes leads to greatness).

The floor lamp also got some gold love:

It's a super gloomy day so I couldn't great pics but here's one of both together so you can see how they look in the room (keepin' it real moment with my tv watching boy).

I'm definitely lamp satisfied now and don't plan on changing up lamps for a loooong time. Haha, Lamp drama! Oh my :)