Next week I hope to share my entire dining room makeover…just waiting on a rug and the chairs I ordered.

This week I want to share one tiny element.

In my quest to make a few improvements to my dining room I decided to change up the buffet vignette…specifically get rid of the floral arrangement and style it a bit differently.

(You can check out the buffet makeover HERE! )

So off to Home Goods and At Home I went. One element I wanted to add to the buffet was a tall lamp but I couldn’t find the one I had in my mind. I found some candle sticks I liked…only problem was I didn’t really like the tallest one as a candle stick…but when I stuck this little lamp shape on it I decided I kinda liked the look of it as a lamp…

Hum?

I THOUGHT the candle stick was ceramic or resin…I also thought it was hollow. So I THOUGHT I could drill a hole in the top and a hole in the base with a masonry bit, thread in some lamp cord, add a little socket and presto-bingo…a lamp.

What is the old saying about “best laid plans.”

Yeah…well…some things just don’t work out the way we THINK they should…this, my friends, is more the norm in DIY. Things often don’t go as planned….

So the first thing I discovered was that it is wood…not a biggy.

I can just drill a hole from the top to my bottom hole with one of my really long drill bits…right? Wrong. Because the drill hit metal…turns out the candle stick is actually made up of three different sections…with screws AND glue between each. Impossible to take apart so I ended up cutting the sections with my chop saw.

Fortunately it was a tad easier to drill through the individual sections than to drill through the entire tall candle stick.

Whew…that was a booger…but after that was all said and done, it was time to “repurpose” the whole thing into a lamp.

To make anything into a lamp, you will need a socket and a lamp cord…fortunately you can buy both of these things at Lowe’s.

To use the little top socket, I just removed the little screw on the side of the base…

… and drilled a hole in the top of the candle stick big enough for the base of the socket to sit in (1/2”).

To thread the new electrical cord through the stick, I threaded a thin wire (floral wiring works well) through the stick sections. Then I wrapped the thin wire around the end of the new electrical cord and pulled the wire back through.

Once the new electrical wiring was threaded through each section, I easily attached it to the new socket, set the socket into the 1/2” hole I drilled on the top section and hot glued it in.

Then to reconnect the three sections, I applied wood glue and a dab of hot glue just to hold it all together while the wood glue set up.

Presto-bingo…a lamp made out of a candle stick.

I like it.

Unfortunately I don’t think the existing art work will work with the candlestick/lamp…curses. For now I think I will just leave it be.

I took a few sprigs of the greenery from the old floral arrangement and stuck them in a little ironstone creamer…one of my little birdies…a stack of old books I had stashed away.

Trying to keep it simple for now but really looking forward to having a buffet to decorate for the holidays!

I THINK I will like the new rug and chairs I ordered…we will see. I already have one rug in the garage ready to go back to “At Home”…didn’t like it. My plan was to go with a tad more color but this rug has me second guessing that decision.

I am also contemplating curtains…I’ve had blinds for 20 years…we’ll see…one thing at a time.

It is coming along…