ORB-session

After reading about ORB on Young House Love, I knew this was an easy project that would make a big impact. My first candidate? My mom's old brass lamp that has been around since I was a child. The shape was beautiful, but the brass and lampshade really dated it. Here's the lamp as I have know it these past 28 years:

 

At first I took the lamp outside in the grass and placed it on old newspaper - that did not work! It was hard to get to the base and these little weird bugs kept leaping out of the grass and sticking to the fresh spray paint. Insert genius husband idea here and we decided on this method:

Sure, the neighbors thought we were a little nuts and my dad had to maneuver the lawnmower around it, but it worked perfectly.

After about three coats of ORB and letting it dry for a few hours, it was off to Target to find a lampshade. Long story short, make sure you know how your specific lamp shade screws in and save yourself an extra trip. I was really looking forward to using a cool, modern drum shade...but then when I got home I realized it would fit on my lamp! I ended up buying the most modern-ish shade I could find, which was still a little too 'old-fashioned' for me.

Here it is all finished!

It still looked good and definitely brightened up the table. I was this close to convincing my mom to let me spray paint her brass headboard, but I guess that will have to wait for another trip!