floor lamp makeover

Before I start this post, I have to apologize for the picture quality you're about to see. Between the lack of natural light in my condo and trying to take pictures of a light with my simple camera and limited photography skills, it's not great. I know, and I'm sorry...

My bedroom has no ceiling light and one of the outlets in the room is supposed to work with the light switch, but none of them do. So I have to switch lamps on by hand at night, and most of the time I end up using other nearby lights because it's just easier. Not ideal, but I've never bothered to have an electrician figure out which outlet should be connected to the light switch and fix it. Maybe one of these days...

Anyway, I've had this floor lamp in my bedroom for years. When I bought it I thought I was going to use a lot of this brushed silver look, but at some point I changed my mind and I have nothing else like it anywhere in my house. The color and style of the lamp really stuck out in my bedroom and I knew I needed to change it.

Here it is outside before I started the makeover.

 I took off the plastic shade and taped off all the electrical stuff, then I spray painted it with oil rubbed bronze. 

Changing the silver made a big difference, and I also wanted to do something with the shade since the old one didn't go with the style of my room. I bought this drum shade with the intention of covering it with fabric, but once I got started on that I wasn't loving it and I actually really like the color and texture of the original shade, so I decided to just leave it as is.

The best and easiest part of this makeover was "installing" the new shade. I literally just plopped in down right over the top of the old one.

Here it is back in my bedroom. I know it's hard to see, but hopefully you can get an idea of how much better it goes with the rest of the room.

Here it is in better light

I would still love to add something to bulk up that long pole, but for a quick and inexpensive makeover I think it's good for now.

This is another one of those things that I lived with for years even though I didn't love it (like the knife block I painted last week), and now that I spent 5 minutes fixing it up a little bit I wonder why I didn't do it earlier. It isn't perfect, but it's so much better than it was before!