A Lamp Revamp

Hello!

Awhile back, I shared my Pottery Barn lamp knock-off – where I took a wood thrift store lamp and gave it a fresh new look with chalk paint.

A friend of mine, had a lamp that belonged to her grandmother that she wanted to keep.   But it needed a little bit of love.  I painted her kitchen and bookcases this summer, so she recruited me to tackle this lamp as well.  Here is where we started (sorry – I took this photo at night!).

But you get the idea – it was a deep green color, and this lamp was huge and heavy.  I think it weighed as much as my girlfriend.

We were going for this style for the finished look – which I love:

I was a little nervous about how I would achieve the look I wanted, since this lamp wasn’t wood like the one that I did before.  But then, I remembered the technique I used on this console table that I did for another client, and keyed off of that.   I’m a bad blogger, I didn’t get good photos of the process – but let’s talk through it and look at the finished product.

I started off by using Annie Sloan’s Chalk Paint in Coco as a base coat.  That gives it a solid color as a foundation for the rest of it.  After the base coat was applied, I used a dry brush technique to bring some depth to the lamp.  I like using a brush like this one for the dry brushing.  To achieve this look, I used a combination of several different colors and products.

• I started by dry brushing with Annie Sloan’s Old Ochre.  In doing this, put a little paint on your brush, tap off the excess on a paper towel, and then brush more off on a piece of cardboard.  You really don’t want to use a lot of paint in this part of the process.
• Then I added a small bit of black paint using Amy Howard’s One Step Paint.  It just needed a bit more depth than I was getting with the Old Ochre.
• Finally, I used Annie Sloan’s dark wax over the finished look, which really brought it all together and gave it that “wood” look that I was looking for.

Here is the finished lamp – a nice refresh, don’t you think?  I love a good lamp revamp.  We’re still looking for more of a barrel shade for it, but it’s so huge, we’ve had a hard time finding what we want!

Have you done any lamp revamps lately?

Jenny