Upcycling Thrift Store Lamps

Alright, I’m taking a leap of faith with these babies. Let me fill you in my current lamp situation to catch you up to speed:

Our living room (where we spend most of our limited time at home relaxing together) has zero overhead lights (Dear 1960s: home design-fail.)

We are currently lighting the room with 2 desk lamps in lieu of making any decisions/movement on the direction of the room.

The living room also has a nice bay window, but we typically keep our curtains closed because, well, frankly it just seems weird to have people watch us live our lives (Is that weird? Hey, I grew up on 10 acres where we had no neighbors, I blame that). I digress. Therefore, the natural light that WOULD come through those windows is minimal/nonexistent.

Our future plans will be to take down the wall between the kitchen and living room for the open concept we desire, but that’s a ways down the road. Reason being that it will be a complete domino effect of remodeling:

1) Take down the wall (debris, giant beam header- it’s obviously structural, blah blah blah)

2) Fix the ceiling (and put in recessed LIGHTS!)

3) Re-do the kitchen

4) Fix the floor (because we can’t do that before we re-do the kitchen layout)

Oh yeah we were talking about LIGHTS. So since we don’t have our open concept living room/kitchen layout YET, the living room is a bit “cave-ish”. I need to brighten that baby up. (Maybe that will help to force Matt to not fall asleep on the couch at 9pm-while I then stay up till midnight? Probably not.)

Enter: lamps. I have been on the hunt for big lamps, which p.s. can be expensive. I wanted larger, substantial lamps since they will be the main sources of light in the room (and smaller lamps in the rather large, long living room would look pewny). Also, I didn’t want to spend an arm and a leg on the lamps since per the list above, you can see that we eventually would like recessed lighting (but don’t want to live in the “cave” until then).

I stopped by the trusty Goodwill, a mere few miles from my house (WAY dangerous), and found these lamps, which p.s. I know are currently pretty dang ugly.

When I was trying to describe them over the phone to Matt/my sister/my Mom at Goodwill, I said “They are like Spanish, plaster, ‘Arizona-like’ material, but they are nice and big, there is a set of 2, and they are $10 each, and they work”. Yep that pretty much sums them up. The question will be how to transform my $20 investment (plus 2 new lamp shades) into fab lamps for our living room.

The wheels are already turnin’….

Here is some inspiration, what do you think?! Can I make transform these guys into something fab?! Here’s to hoping!