Tag: DIY

Chris and I have lived in our townhouse for over seven years now – it’ll be eight in October! Incoming cliché: I can’t even believe how fast time flies. And in those 7+ years, we’ve been staring at this builders-grade brass chandelier above our dining room table. Well, not continuously staring, but still. Every time I see it, I feel brassy sadness. But alas, we (meaning me, really) haven’t found another fixture that we I love. It has to have a ridiculously long chain/cord, so that narrows our choices down unless we want to have something rewired (which I’m willing to do if I found the right fixture).

For perspective, here’s a really old photo I took before we moved in when we were house-hunting. (Aw, memories!) See how the chandelier is installed on the vaulted ceiling? Well, it’s cut off in the photo, but you can hopefully picture it. I have been dreaming of at least painting the fixture with oil-rubbed bronze spray paint, but as you can imagine, getting it down and putting it back up would require a really really tall ladder and some nerves, so we just haven’t tried it. I contemplated spray painting it right in place with drop cloths over everything, but that’s risky, too. I’m sure I’d get paint everywhere. I can’t even brush my teeth without making a mess.

So I continued to hunt for the perfect dining room lighting. I love the look of the oversized drum shades that I’ve been seeing everywhere. I have been staring longingly at these photos (found on houzz.com):

And I even found a lamp at west elm that I really liked, but it’s a single-bulb fixture and I was worried it wouldn’t give off much light. 

I actually bought it hoping to just plop the shade over our existing fixture, but the shade was a little too shallow and wouldn’t completely hide our little brass monkey.

Enter Pinterest and its glorious wealth of inspiration. I saw someone else pin a few tutorials on how to make your own custom drum shade – perfect! I read through a few of them and decided to give it a try. I mostly followed along with The Keylor Family’s tutorial and made a few adjustments of my own.

Here are my supplies, pretty much the same as the other tutorials out there – two 23″ quilting hoops, two acrylic panels, fabric, glue gun/sticks (not pictured), and hanging hardware. I wanted a light neutral color, so I decided to go with a fairly stiff canvas fabric so that it would be opaque enough to mostly hide the shadows. I chose a white rip-stop nylon for the diffuser panel underneath because I liked that it was very sheer but also sturdy. I also decided to use eyelet screws and picture-hanging wire to hang the shade.

I didn’t have a special tool to cut the acrylic panels (found at Home Depot – they’re the covers for fluorescent ceiling lights) so I just used scissors and manhandled my way through after measuring them for my hoops and for the depth I wanted to cover the entire fixture. The panels actually chipped and splintered quite a bit, so after a minute of cutting I decided I better wear glasses. Safety first, yo!

Once I had the panels cut to size, I wrapped them around the inner rims of the two quilting hoops (hang onto the outer rims – you might end up using one like I did), and held it all together with a bunch of binder clips.

Then, with my trusty glue gun I worked my way around the edges with beads of glue in between the hoop and acrylic panel, removing the binder clips as I went along. I actually cracked the acrylic at one point while trying to get my glue gun in between. I had a mini heart-attack, but it was okay. Try to be gentle, but if a crack occurs it will be hidden behind the fabric so no worries.

Voila, the finished structure:

Next, I measured my fabric – thanks to math, I knew I needed the diameter of the hoop multiplied by 3.14 (a.k.a. pi) plus a little extra to fold over as a clean seam. Go, geometry! I ironed my fabric first to get any wrinkles out and to press a clean folded edge on one side. Once my fabric was prepped, I used the wrap-and-binder-clip method to hold the fabric in place while I glued. Tip: pull and tug as you go along. I actually started with a bead of glue on one side, then went across to the opposite side and put a bead there, and sort of went in sections almost like cutting a pie from whole to halves to quarters, etc.

After I glued all the way around, I realized I was left with some extra fabric that would show through on the edges when the light was on, so I went back and trimmed it with scissors.

Still with me? Okay, so here’s the part where I got excited and forgot to take photos for each step. I liked the look of the rip-stop fabric for the diffuser panel, but gluing it into the inside of the shade like the Keylors did wasn’t working – I couldn’t get it taut enough and it was sagging. Thankfully I was able to pull it back out and come up with another idea.

I grabbed the outer part of the quilting hoop, pried the wooden block adjusting things off using a butter knife and removed the staples. I put that ring inside the shade to determine what size would fit snugly, marked it, and then cut the hoop down and taped the ends together. Then, I wrapped the rip-stop nylon around again securing it with the binder clips, and was able to pull it so tight across that it was like a drum head while gluing.

Super smooth! Next, I trimmed that excess fabric from around the edges.

I was able to place it right inside the shade (from the top-down). It was a perfect fit and I probably didn’t even have to glue it in place, but I did run a line of glue around the edges in between the two hoops just to add some reinforcement. Here’s the nearly-finished shade upside-down.

To hang the shade, I installed four little eyelet screws into the top hoop. I actually used Chris’s drill to make a tiny pilot hole because I couldn’t get the eyelet screw to just screw into the wood. Then, I strung the picture hanging wire onto s-hooks and through the chain of our chandelier. It seems sturdy enough! 

And here’s the finished product! Ta da! Yes, I did go buy fresh flowers to celebrate. And I did a little dance.

Here’s how she looks lit up in the evening. I can still see a little bit of the outline of the chandelier, but it’s not bad.

And here’s a picture of the seam – I lined it up with one of the spots where the acrylic panels meet.

I’m really happy with the way it turned out! The total cost was $43, and it only took about 4 hours. I’m calling this Pinterest project a definite success – this should tide us over until we find the perfect light fixture. Or we may just leave it up forever. Onto the next project!

UPDATE 8/23: I’m not sure I would recommend using the nylon ripstop fabric for the diffuser panel. This morning it was a little bit wavy in some spots – the nylon seems to change with temperature, because when I turned the light on for a few minutes, the fabric eventually tightened back up. (Is this a “duh” thing that everyone else knows about nylon? I had no idea.) The wrinkles weren’t bad enough that it’s noticeable unless you inspect it, but it might be enough to bug me into trying to change it out. 🙂

UPDATE 9/12: Oddly enough, the nylon fabric stayed tightened up and hasn’t wrinkled again after a few weeks now, so I’m happy with that choice. It looks really great.

Let me know if you have any questions about any of the steps!

Happy Monday! I just wanted to show (off) a tiny/quick update that Chris and I finally completed in our house. It’s really the smallest detail, but it makes such a huge difference! Any guesses from the following iPhone snapshots as to what it is?

We finally finished changing out all the hardware on our doors! We swapped out all the brass knobs, hinges and doorstops with oil-rubbed bronze hardware and I LOVE the difference it makes. They really pop off the white doors now, and I find myself just staring at them sometimes.

It’s really sad funny sad how long it took us to complete this super easy project. First, we ended up making three separate trips to Home Depot for the supplies because the person in charge of counting the hardware (ahem…me) kept missing one or two here and there. Second, we sort of have home-projects-ADD, otherwise known as HPADD. We would do a few knobs, admire our work, then wander off to watch TV or something. Chris ended up doing the rest of the knobs one weekend while I wasn’t home – yay! But then it was several months before we felt like doing the hinges, especially since the first door took us a long time. We removed the entire door and tried to swap all three hinges at once. It was awkward, even with two people. We eventually realized it’s much easier to just leave the door in place and replace each hinge at a time.

So there you have it! The tiniest and not-too-expensive little update (I think our total was around $385 for 12 doors) and we love the results. My next project in de-brassing the house is to refinish the rest of the light fixtures – I’ve already successfully done one and I love how it turned out. After four more fixtures, that will be the last of the brass. More on that soon!

Did I ever tell you how much I love DIY projects around the house? When Chris and I bought our very first home back in 2005, I think we felt invincible, like we could do any and all of the fix-it projects around the house. Home Depot says, “You can do it, we can help,” and we believed them! We frequently tackled the projects that most people face with a new home – painting, installing appliances, replacing light fixtures, hanging shelving, etc. We’ve since become pretty busy with our jobs and haven’t had as much time to do DIY home projects, but we still do some smaller ones here and there. Over the summer I finally refinished this standing mirror in our master bedroom. I’ve had it since I was in high school! Back then, this sort of forest green went well with my room, but it certainly didn’t work with our bedroom today.

So I decided on a paint color that would tie in with our drapes and bedding. I may one day change out our duvet color, but I always want this sort of soothing gray-blue-greenish color in the room, so I landed on a Sherwin-Williams color called “Quietude.” Isn’t that a perfect name for a bedroom paint color?

I took the mirror apart in the garage, and got to work. I went right ahead and applied a layer of Zissner primer without sanding because I’m lazy impatient efficient like that! I used a small foam roller for the primer and the paint (one roller for each), and used a small foam brush to work into the corners. I let each coat dry for several hours in between.

Two coats of Quietude later, here is the before and after! I love the new color, and it works perfectly in our bedroom. The color is nice and soft, and not even a tiny sliver of that dark green is showing through the light blue-green thanks to Zissner!

I really wasn’t sure what kind of finish to expect since I didn’t sand first, but it turned out very smooth and I’m really happy with it. I suppose if there were lumps and bumps in the original green paint I would have sanded, but luckily it was a job well done by my mom who originally painted it for me in high school.

And here’s a wider snapshot of our room. It’s still a work in progress – we need to get some shelves up on the walls, and I eventually want to do something else with that dresser the TV sits on. But isn’t it so fun to peek inside people’s houses?!