Light fixture makeover!

 When we bought our house just over two years ago, one of the things that I hated about it was the light fixture hanging in the kitchen eating area. It has a big star on each side, which is fine if you're going for some kind of western theme I suppose, but the darn thing is plastic...it isn't even glass! Talk about cheap. There were also two matching sconces on the living room wall and I wasted no time removing them before the furniture arrived, but for the hanging light I wanted to find just the right one first.

Fast forward to now and it was still hanging there...I mean come on, look at how ugly it is! Awful. I went to Lowe's yesterday to buy a ceiling fan while they were on sale and looked at the lights while I was there. While I found several that I really liked, they aren't cheap! The least expensive acceptable fixture I could find was $139 but most of the ones I really liked were closer to $200. So I got creative instead and bought a $19.97 lamp shade.

 I was determined that somehow, some way, I was going to get that ugly shade off the fixture that was already hanging in my house and attach the lamp shade to it. Not only would this save me money, but I would not have to do any electrical work by switching fixtures out. Once I got on my ladder to inspect what I was dealing with, I realized that the guts of the fixture were completely separate from the shade, which was sort of sitting on the whole mechanism on a tiny little metal ledge. The shade would freely spin around the main part of the light. There was a fairly big square metal area that the shade was built on, and thankfully there were holes in the corners of this metal plate. Access!

 The problem was that it was metal...so it's not like I could just use scissors. After going back and forth to my tools boxes several times I finally found just the right wire cutters and literally gnawed my way through the metal plate around the fixture until I had created a big enough hole to remove the shade from the fixture. Then I just cut the excess metal off the main pole to clean it up.

 Yay! As luck would have it, I realized pretty quickly that once I removed the bulb from the fixture, all I had to do was set the lamp shade in place and screw the bulb back in, which would hold the shade in place. Ta-da!!!!

 Basically a have a brand new light fixture for the cost of a lamp shade. I also bought a small table lamp with matching shade to replace the old lamp that was in the living room (which moved to the spare bedroom because I needed a lamp in there) so now they look like a matching set I might have purchased together. Even better is that when I get tired of this look, all I have to do is buy a new lamp shade!