Make your own lamp from scratch with these easy directions. You'll be so in awe of this homemade scrap wood lamp with a hand painted lampshade, you'll want to make your own right away!
Materials:
- Lamp shade
- Deco Art paint
- Small pointed brush
- Scrap pieces of wood
- Miter saw
- Sand paper
- 3/4 inch bore bit
- Stain
- Gorilla wood glue
- Nail gun
- Cord
Instructions:
- The first thing I did was lightly pencil a design onto the lamp shade. I am slightly obsessed with paisley so that is what I chose.
- I used a small pointed brush to paint on the design. If you don't want to hand paint your shade you can by all means cover your shade in fabric. A little spray adhesive or modpodge and your set.
- Now for the base. I had my husband gather up all my scrap pieces of wood from past projects. I cut all the wood with my miter saw. I didn't even measure. I just grabbed it and cut random sizes.
- As I was cutting I stacked them up to make sure I was cutting enough to get the height I wanted.
- When they were all cut, I sanded the heck out of them. I wanted all the edges and corners to be smooth. I have kids whose heads seem to be magnetically drawn to sharp edges.
- I used a bore bit (3/4 inch) to make holes in the center of each one. Again, I did not measure. Great huh? That is probably why I like this project so much. I put the piece I was drilling on top of a piece that would not be used for the lamp.
- I did not want the cord coming out of a hole in the very bottom piece or else the lamp would wobble. So I did not drill a hole in the very bottom board. I took the second the last board and drilled a hole on the side that went all the way through until it met up with the center hole. You will get a better idea of what I am talking about when you see me put the cord through this hole a little later. All you need to understand now is that I am a genius for thinking that up.
Here are all the pieces to my lamp puzzle!
- Then I stained them all a dark walnut. This is right after I stained them. The stain sinks into the wood slowly. It ended up being lighter than this. I like dark stain for many reasons and one of them is that it hides imperfections quite well. Since this was all scrap wood, there were definitely imperfections!
- Time to assemble! I used Gorilla wood glue on the bottom of the board and then added it to the base.
- I nail gunned it so it would stay in place while the glue dried. Also, I just like any excuse to pull out my favorite tool :)
- Then I strung the cord through.
- After that it is pretty much like you are stringing giant beads onto a string. Glue, string it on, nail once or twice and repeat. Now, I need to point out that some of the chunks of wood were too thick to nail. But the glue when dry will be strong enough. I didn't worry about it. I figured that it was better to have most of them held in place than none of them. I literally just grabbed and stuck it on, then grabbed another. No rhyme or reason. I have found that if you want a truly random look that it is best to make it truly random. Because of that and not measuring anything, this was an EASY project.
