LET THERE BE LIGHTING

“It's raining,” my dog Edward told me this morning.
“I know.”
“And it's Saturday morning and there won't be any yard sales,” he went on.
“I know.” This time I growled it.
“Good, you can stay home with me,” he said, and settled down for a nap.

Dogs generally are philosophical about rain. I might as well be too.

Since it's a dark day outside, I have various lamps turned on in the house, and it made me realize how many of them were thrifted. We have two of these spiffy desk lamps, which we bought at a yard sale over ten years ago.
They were expensive, I think $15 for the pair (that’s expensive to me!) but since we’ve had them so long the Cost Per Wow has become quite reasonable. We originally used them for bedside lamps. When we moved to this house they were both on my husband’s desk until my little Ikea desk lamp died. So I stole one for my desk.

I blogged last fall about giving this lamp a new cover.
The lamp was free, and after much experimentation I used super-inexpensive vintage tea towels to recover it. It lives on the midcentury walnut dresser that we scored off Craiglist.

I love this stained glass lamp, especially since I moved it to the elderly drop-leaf desk in the dining room. Yes, of course the desk came from a garage sale—as did the picture above.


We’ve replaced all of the standard shades on the ceiling lights in our house with more interesting vintage models. This is in my husband’s study…
…in my home office…
…these are in the hallway…

…and this is in the guest room.

I think we have a few more pieces stashed away in the attic. Haven’t found any for a long time; most of the houses in this area are not of an age to yield interesting ceiling glass.

My favorite lamp is this amazing midcentury piece.

It’s made of decorated glass, I'm guessing Danish from the late Fifties, early Sixties. It was taller when I bought it—had a long metal neck piece, and came without a shade. I'm betting it originally sported one of those really tall cylindrical shades. We rewired it and gave it a shorter neck. When I found it at a yard sale, I was iffy about buying it because the price was something like ten bucks. I ended up offering five, they said sure, and I've never been sorry. The guy who sold it to me said it came from the home of a wealthy doctor and had originally cost $500. To myself I said yeah, sure it did, but I've come to believe he may have been close to the mark. I was thumbing through a catalog from Room & Board the other day (if you don’t know their stuff, it’s nice…but strikes me as very expensive Ikea) and noticed that their table lamps generally run from $300-500. (And there’s a desk lamp, not nearly as interesting as mine, for $375. Guess fifteen bucks for the pair wasn’t so bad.) The shade was found by a friend at another sale for a quarter. One of these days I may recover the shade with more interesting fabric. Meanwhile, every time I walk by the lamp I'm entranced anew by the wonderfully silly peacocks parading around the base.


Edward just came in to point out that it's raining even harder. He’s right, as usual. The perfect day to bake cinnamon rolls, turn on a lamp and hang out with the dogs and a novel. There might be something in this rain stuff after all.