I love lamp

My new apartment has a bit of a lighting problem. That is, during the day, it gets a lot of natural light. So much, in fact, that the sun turns it into a greenhouse very quickly and the cat splays herself on the floor and looks forlorn at me because of the heat. So, I had to put in blackout curtains to try to fight the sunlight. As soon as the sun goes behind the complex though, the living room gets very dark, very quickly. To exacerbate the problem, there is no overhead light in the space. There is a switch like there should be, though.

After about 15 minutes of plugging my reading lamp into every outlet in the room and trying the switch (which always reminds me of that episode of Friends, by the way) I finally found the outlet in the corner that is controlled by the mystery switch by the door. If you happen to be a contractor or apartment manager reading this, a nice thing to do is to mark crap like that, just as an aside. But, that's a rant for a different day. Where I was going with this is that I have an outlet controlled by a switch, and I have a dark room. Clearly, I need a lamp. This should be easy, right?

The first trouble is that I have a long standing vendetta against floor lamps. They're lovely, really, but I am way too clumsy to keep them around. Whenever I think that a floor lamp is a good idea, I quickly knock it over and break it, or something glass near it, or myself. Seriously, I'm a mess. I own that.

The second little snag is that had this vision in my head, of a lovely orange lamp to compliment my curtains and accent pillows. But, orange lamps are expensive and sort of extravagant, you know like headboards, so I couldn't really justify it. What I really needed was cheap, functional table lamp. Boo. How boring.

So, I drudged off to Goodwill to find an ugly, albeit functional lamp and came home with this $9 beauty complete with what appeared to be a little bit of bird poop on the shade. Lovely. The size was right, the shape was right, but what it really needed, was a little makeover.

I, of course, masked off the metal, pulled out a can of spray paint and went to work. Then, I ventured to JoAnns (yes, again, and yes, the ladies there are starting to judge me) for something teal and geometric to cover the ugly shade with. I watched this howcast tutorial about how to cover a lampshade, which was overall, helpful. Spray adhesive and I haven't really been getting along lately, so I ended up covering the raw edges on the inside of the lampshade with more white duct tape. As it turns out, you're supposed you use fabric glue (whoops)-- check out this tutorial instead if you're planning on this project. But that aside, for about $15 I've got a pretty new lamp that I'm sort of in love with.

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