I fell in love with this Music Stand Lamp from The Painted Hive. This lady has the best blog. Her posts are well written and are accompanied by great pictures. Just when you think her blog post is over she offers the most detailed tutorials. You guys should totally follow her! Plus her name is Kristine so I’d say she’s blog BFF material. 🙂

Okay, onward and upward.

Just about a week after I found Kristine’s post on her music stand turned lamp, I actually found the base of a music stand at Goodwill. I’d say that’s serendipitous. Actually, some helpful Goodwill shopper was looking out for me cause as soon as I picked up the music stand base he quickly stepped into helpful action mode by declaring that he already checked it out and there was no music sheet holder to go on top of the stand.

And with a DIY twinkle in my eye I said, “oh that’s too bad”, and then chucked it into my cart.

I was feeling a bit Dr. Frankenstein as I rode off into the sunset thinking about how I was going to transform this once ineffective music stand into a lamp above all lamps.

So it began with a trip to Lowe’s to buy this light kit. It was $10 and a bit more expensive than I thought they would be. This is my first lamp making effort. Anyone know if this is a good price?

Lest, you believe that the following hand model is me let me say that Big Daddy had his man hands all up in this DIY. In fact, I just watched cause I had no idea what I was doing. But if you end up doing something like this you’ll quickly figure out that this is EASY!

Begin by threading your cord up from the bottom of the stand. The cord should float through the tube effortlessly thanks to the perfect size of the stand’s shaft.

Rather than giving you a million words to describe what is already laid out on the back of the light kit package, I’ll just mention a few things we did differently than what the directions wanted us to do. As you can see from the package we were given 3 different sized white cap adaptor thingys (What? Spell check says that “thingys” is spelled wrong. Whatev.) which we didn’t use because they didn’t fit onto the music stand. No biggie. We did use the long screw thingy to secure the light socket (pictured above).

Here Big Daddy has wrapped the wires (from inside the white cord) around the screws on each side of the socket.

Big Daddy decided that a knot at the base of the music stand would stop the cord from floating up and pushing the socket up and off of the top of our stand. Good call, Biggie.

When we put the socket into the opening at the top of the stand we realized without the white cap adaptor thingys this socket was going to lean. So I found some sports bandage tape and we wrapped it around the metal screw at the base of the socket to fill in the gap when we inserted the socket into the stand. With a little work this thing fit like a bug in a rug. No more leaning!

I haven’t figured out where it will go yet so you’ll have to excuse the set up above. 🙂

So what do you think? I’m not in love with the shade but it was one that I had hanging around and I’m debating whether I want to ORB the stand or spray paint it a bright color. What would you do?