Scavenger Chic

DIY Orb Chandelier

• By Joan
• September 17, 2014
• 17 Comments

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Last month I had an enjoyable day  scavenging the  Route 11 Yard Crawl with one of my sons and 2 sisters.  By all appearances, I ended up with a pile of junk, but it was gold to me.  As they say, one man’s trash… This is a picture of our haul.

Not all of it is mine, but leaning against the small table are these fantastic wooden hoops.  I believe they are from some kind of basket, and boy did I get a deal, at least I think I did, $5.00 for all eight hoops.  A couple were warped, more oval shaped than  circular.  I immediately remembered all the  diy orb lights I’ve been seeing around the web…these orbs were mine.  And now you can see what they became.

You may also notice the 4 rusty cans in front that look like gas cans…those were maple syrup cans…and you can see their final project here.  But on with the orb light…

a.  This was the pile of hoops when I got them home.   Before working with them, I sanded them slightly with sandpaper then stained and varnished.  For me, the poly stain worked the best.  That is, the polyurethane and stain in one container and painted on.  This one was water clean up…even better.

b.  This is a chandelier that I had in my ‘to be donated pile.’  If I could get it apart, I could use the piece in the middle with the 3 lights.

c.  Amazingly enough, the pieces just unscrewed and I found all the wire connections inside the fixture to be typical connections.  All the black wires were connected together as were the white ones.

d.  Took a picture of the order the pieces were connected just in case I mixed them up.

e. Spray painted all the chandelier pieces black, taping off the outlets so as not to get paint inside the sockets.

f.  Wood is now stained and varnished.  Overlapped three of the hoops at one central point and drilled a hole large enough to insert a threaded nipple.  The one that came with the light fixture was too short, so had to purchase a longer one.  Luckily, Home Depot sells a multipack in their lighting section.

Before adding the hoop that would go around the outside of my chandelier, I had to start wiring.  I had bought some cloth covered chandelier wire on etsy just for this project.  Chandelier wire comes with 3 wires, a hot, a neutral and a ground wire as opposed to lamp wire which only comes with a hot and a neutral wire.   I’m sure that somewhere there is an electrician turning over in his grave listening to me explain wiring.

Any way, even though I had never worked with cloth covered wire,  I thought it would look better than a chain with the old wooden hoops.   My first obstacle was cutting the wire.  My tin snips did the job.

My second obstacle, threading the wire down through the long pipe to the sockets.  There wasn’t much room so I had to remove the cloth casing so it would fit.

The wire is now down to the bottom where I need to attach my black to black, white to white….. but as you can see, there is no black and white.  Apparently my wire is European.  In Europe, and the rest of the world, brown is the hot color (black), blue is neutral (white )   and the green/yellow is  the ground wire  (isn’t google wonderful?).     Once that was figured out , it was just a matter of stripping off the very ends with wire strippers to expose the wire and twisting those in with the existing wires from the lamp.

Screwed everything back together on my lighting fixture and attached my other hoop to go around the diameter of the ball.  With small black screws, I attached this hoop to my other 3 hoops wherever they intersected.

Still wanted to test out the light before attaching it to my ceiling fixture, just in case anything came loose when I was shoving it back into the light.  Success!! On to the final installation.

Love the shadows it creates on the ceiling.  Now, what should I do with my other odd shaped hoops?

I was featured at   

Also shared at  Between Naps on the Porch,  Knick of Time , Metamorphosis Monday , Trash to Treasure Tuesday , Wow us Wednesdays,

Thank Goodness its Thursday  , Super Saturday Link Party , Tweak it Tuesday ,  Funky Junk Party Junk 

Think and Make Thursday and at  Best of the Nest

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