Frankenlamp (Patreon)

My first foray into electrical stuff!

I fucking love chandeliers. I've always wanted to live in a place with chandeliers. Now that I've bought a place, I can't just sit around hoping to one day live in a place that has chandeliers. I have to put them in my damn self.

So when I saw this for sale on a table in my neighborhood, I snapped it up pretty damn quickly.

I didn't know how to install it so it just sat around for a while. Then I realized that, in addition to being very femme, I'm also very practical. Practical me wanted ceiling fans, especially in the bedroom. Ceiling fans are not chandeliers but they occupy the same space, so you can see my dilemma.

Luckily, I ran across this blog post about turning a chandelier into a standing lamp. Essentially, it just said to glue a chandelier on to a lamp base. The lamp base was easily obtained at a thrift store (in the before times.) But the blog post assumed that your chandelier was already a plug in, which seems rather presumptuous to me. I found another blog post about making a chandelier into a plug-in, so at least I knew it was possible. Still, it was not a pressing project so, the parts all spent more time sitting around.

Since I can't work right now, and I was feeling particularly butch, I decided to was time to figure this shit out. I didn't have the pluggy thing the blog talked about but I did have the wiring in the lamp I was using as a base, so maybe I could make that work. I watched a few lamp repair tutorials on youtube and realized that all this fancy electrical stuff was mostly just twisting wires together, so I could probably do this. 

I do not wish to malign the noble craft of the electrician. You have to twist the right wires, and you have to do it carefully or you might die or burn your house down. But it's not the magic I thought it might be. 

This project actually took much longer than it needed to because I was *sure* it couldn't be this simple. I spent hours googling for information that simply doesn't exist. Finally, a call with my mom, Hilary, confirmed that I had *almost* everything I needed. She begged me to go out and get some wire nuts and not just rely on electrical tape, no matter how secure it looked in the youtube tutorial.

The fairy wings are incidental, not involved in any lamp making projects.

I also spent a lot of time taking the two appliances apart and figuring out how to put them back together. Eventually I settled on taking the chandelier part that usually attaches to the ceiling, and stuck it to the lamp base with epoxy putty. That made a big enough holder for the chandelier to rest on top of.

Et voila!

I should probably paint the black part, but I'm pretty happy with it as is right now.

I used my newly acquired knowledge to turn this hardwired ikea fixture into a hanging lamp. Deathstar chandelier!

Ceiling fans will happen in the not too distant future. Whenever I'm feeling butch again I suppose.