Thanks, guys.
Yesterday and today I was able to get a little time in the garage to do a project. Since we moved in, my wife has felt that the sconces (sp?) on either side of our living room fireplace were too small. She liked the lights themselves, but just didn't like the proportion of them to the other stuff around them.
So of course, for the next eight years I didn't do anything about it. Those lights looked fine to me.
But then she got out to do some shopping, and came home with some replacement possibilities. To me, they looked goofy -- and junky -- and they were used, torn out of some old house. Full disclosure would be they're correctly called antiques, which I get and I'm fine with. My race car is an antique, too. But the cheapest set of replacements was priced at $1,500.
Used or antique, that just seems ridiculous to me for lights torn out of some house before it was leveled.
So I suggested we make our own.
To her credit, she didn't dismiss the idea outright. But her deal was she didn't want to wait another 8 years for that idea to come to fruition. So she agreed to take the replacements back as soon as I came up with a new, larger version of the old sconces.
Cut to last night, when the kids fell asleep. I took the rust off some 1/2"x1/2" solid stock and cut a rectangle out of some 16 gauge sheet. Once I had a design I liked, it was very easy.
Here's a picture of one of the old lights. It
does look kind of small next to that sun face thing.
And here's the cut material.
The plan was to re-use the arm part (although I would flip it, which meant tapping a new threaded hole), and also re-use the goofy old man face. Here's the test assembly.
Then this morning, I was able to weld them together, paint them and wire them up. I used flat Rustoleum, which does a nice job of hiding my metal-working sins.
Here's a picture with an idea of the new 'proportion:'
And closer in:
It's hard to get a good picture since the metal part is so dark. But you get the idea. I left a little extra space above the bulb because there's a glass shade we have that my wife wants to try out with the new sconces if we can locate an identical one to pair it with.
This is the nice thing about having the garage set up with the basic tools to do little projects like this. Total cost was just about nothing, since I had steel and paint on hand.
The old-fashioned bulbs were ten bucks each. That's crazy, in this guy's opinion. But it's not half as crazy as $1,500 lamps.
