How to paint a lamp

My mom bought me this fancy lamp for my birthday 4 years ago. It’s from my favorite home store in Austin called Back Home with a 2wist. It wasn’t cheap, and my mom was NOT  happy when I showed her my new and improved lamp! The lamp (on sale + a broken finial discount) was still $200. Yep. That’s why it was a birthday present! But, just look at this beauty…

Back in my Austin condo, I needed a big lamp to sit on the side table. It was the only light source in the room, and a small lamp just wouldn’t do it. The golden colored, clear base worked well in Austin with my green and brown thing I had going on, but it wasn’t working with the new Florida look. And the lamp shade is huge, I’d been trying to find a new one for years. Target does not sell lampshades big enough. While shopping at World Market last month, just out of curiosity, I decided to measure  their lamp shades. Low and behold… their floor lamp shades were the perfect size for my giant table lamp! Whahhh to the hooo!  Who would have thunk it? And at $30 bucks a pop, that bad boy came home with me! I plunked it on my ol’ lamp… and hated it. Yep, it looked awful. A big fat boo. What was I to do? (I should be a rapper!) I either had to drive back to Naples (that’s my closest World Market) or paint the lamp. The lamp was so ugly looking, with the brownish base + yellow shade, I didn’t even snap a picture! (bad blogger!)

The lamp is not glass, I think it’s a super sturdy plastic, and I decided to whip out my acrylic paints and give it a go. This was my test spot. It was streaky looking, which is when I discovered  the great trick. Water!

The little bowl of water made it all better. I just thinned the paint out a tad to make the brush strokes go away. Worked like a charm. It’s glossy and beautiful, don’t you think? : )

The next big delimma was the shade situation. The lamp is made to fit this kind of shade:

But, the World Market shade looks like the diagram below. Thankfully, it is adjustable.

So, here is the new lamp shade in real life. After we adjusted the new shade to be as high as it could, the next issue is the hole. This one is way bigger, and when I stuck it on the lamp base it was super wobbly. Andy to the rescue…!

We used to washers to make the hole smaller and the lamp sturdier.

Andy super glued the 2 washers together adn then glued them to the lamp.  Pretty straight forward…

And here is a lamp before and after…What do you think of the “new” lamp? Have you ever used to water to thin acrylic paint? My mom even admits that looks better in my space!