Hello! Hope this post finds you having a good week!
Today I want to show you how I made the pendant light over the daybed. I love how it turned out and I’m so thankful that Color Cord provided me with the awesome magenta cord for the project. It really pops against the wallpaper and is way cooler than just a plain plastic cord.
First off, I had to assemble the light. Let me just tell you. You can buy pre-assembled light kits or you can buy all the pieces and make your own. I chose to assemble mine thinking that I would do a post about it.
No. Don’t do that unless you actually know what you’re doing. I had to ask my sweet man to do it and therefore I have no pictures. So lets pretend I bought a cord that was ready to go. Let me show you what I did from there.
I should say here that I originally used a different thrifted
basket (the one below). It was bigger and a lighter finish. I loved it until we got the
ceiling fan installed and the two together were too much. That’s when my love of woven baskets paid off. I didn’t even have to go out for another one. I
just grabbed a smaller thrifted basket that was being used as a planter and followed the same steps for it.
Once the cord was assembled, I had to cut a hole in the basket for the light kit. I traced the circle with a permanent marker and used kitchen scissors to cut away pieces of the basket weave.
Once the hole was big enough for the socket to fit, I flipped the basket over and screwed the plastic ring to the other side to hold the socket in place on the basket.
I wanted a cool way for it to hang from the ceiling so on a thrifting trip, I picked up this sweet purple braided belt. It would have been my favorite thing to wear back in elementary school. With my tall bangs and probably outside of an awesome t-shirt.
I cut about a 4 inch piece off and hot glued the braid together so that it wouldn’t unravel. I looped the light cord in a circle a few times and then looped the belt around the cord to make sure the belt had enough room to make it all the way around.
I used a drill to make a pilot hole in the ceiling in the center of the built ins.
Then I inserted a molly into the sheetrock. If you’re paying attention, you can see in the picture below, I actually screwed 2 holes into the sheetrock. The first one was too close to the wall. I have since patched it. Easy peasy.
Once the molly was in, I just drove a screw straight through the leather belt and into the molly, installing the pendant.
From there I played with the length of the cord and the size of the loops until I got the height and look I wanted for the light. The leather belt can even be rotated based on where the cord is going and which angle I want it all to hang.
I ended up using a small zip tie to keep the loop of cords from sliding and hid it under the leather strap .
I have some pre-fan pictures to show you how that light looked.
Now that I look at these pictures, I’m so glad I ended up switching to the smaller basket. I like it so much more.
Here’s the same shot with the smaller basket.
The white light kit stood out too much with the smaller basket so I just took some black paint and did a quick coat to make it less noticeable. I only painted the part above the basket, the section closest to the light bulb is still white.
This basket is so much warmer and works well with the wooden crates and the table and DIY desk. The moral of that story is buy all the baskets…You just never know. ; )
The light looks great and I always love incorporating inexpensive, thrift store hacks
into any room I do so I was happy to make this a feature.
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