5 TIPS ABOUT LAMPS - Interior Design

Today's video that I want to share with you is five tips on how to decorate with lamps. So let's go ahead and get started. I'm in my store which there's tons of lamps so this is a great place to video. Let me talk about first size and placement of your lamps. So this is a sideboard and typically when I'm designing I like to put what's called buffet lamps. They're going to be taller and sometimes they're slimmer. It depends on the size of your sideboard. If it's a really big sideboard you can get away with a bigger base buffet lamp but since this is a smaller sideboard the lamps I chose on here have a smaller base on them and you also want to pay attention to your lampshades which we're going to talk about that in a minute. Typically in a dining room you've only got your overhead lighting so a lot of times when I'm choosing the design I kind of pull away from a big hutch because I know if I pick a sideboard in the room I can add more lighting. So another point about tip number one and your size and placement. A lot of times what I notice is that people when they decorate with lamps sometimes the lamps tend to be too small for where they put it. Sometimes they're too big. In this case although this lamp is pretty and cute it's a little too small for this area. So let me replace it with one I think works just a little bit better. Much better. Now why is it much better? First of all it's a bigger lamp and if you look at it this is a narrow console so the lamp the base of it is also narrow kind of mimics the size of the console and this shade is narrow. Typically when you have a small piece that you're going to put up against the wall you can't do a round shade because it's gonna push the lamp away from the wall. Now I get a lot of questions about whether if a lamp is too big and we have artwork on the wall or a mirror or in this case a clock is that a no-no to have it sitting in front of that. Absolutely not. I think it looks better that way. So tip number two is about style. Now this is probably my favorite tip because I love lamps and I love lamps because they can be their own artwork. So let me show you a few things in here. This lamp right here this is made of cast iron and I can't pick it up with one hand which I love but let me show you something. Beautiful black cast iron sitting on top of this distressed wood table. The contrast is beautiful. Another lamp I picked up that I actually like because I think it's its own artwork. This is an old fire extinguisher that a gentleman made for me and made a lamp out of it. It's its own character. It's its own personality. I love it. Now I tell you what I'm not usually really really picky about lamps as far as they have to be symmetrical except in the bedroom. You'll notice on each side of this bed we have the same exact lamps. That's where I have to keep my lamps the same. I don't know why that kind of drives me a little crazy. So tip number three let me talk to you about lampshades. Lampshades are now kind of there a lot of them are in linen and beige color but there's some coming out now with a little bit of color and I want to show you this lamp over here. I kind of would call it a blue kind of a blue green but look how beautiful it looks with the mercury glass base and again we have a beautiful contrast of the lamp sitting on a white table. This is a mesh wire shade. It's just so unique. I mean this lamp, the distressed metal, everything about it is just beautiful and it's its own statement piece. So tip number four is about light bulbs. I love to have ambient lighting in every room. Like we talked about before in the dining room typically you only have the chandelier so I'm gonna put buffet lamps in there. Now I'm going to put 40 watt bulbs in those because 60 and 100 are going to be too bright and too glaring. Now if you need a lamp in a living room or a bedroom and you need it for reading you're gonna need the 60 watt or higher but if it's just for ambiance go with the 40 watt. Also Edison light bulbs, very popular now you can even find them in tons of home improvement stores. This lamp wouldn't be half as cool if it wasn't for these tall Edison lamps inside. Now tip number five. Listen, if you've already got a lamp that's kind of cool and you like the base of it or you like the style of it, give it a lamp makeover. If you'll give me just a second I'm going to show you how to do that. So this is one of the very first nice lamps I ever bought a few years after I was married. Fast forward about 10 or 15 years and it was a little dated. Let me show you a before picture. So while it was pretty at the time the dark bronze and the dark shade just became dated. So I decided I'm gonna buy a new lamp but the more I thought about it the more I thought this is a great lamp I'm just gonna give it a makeover and save some money. So I replaced the shade with this lighter linen shade and then what I did was I painted the base of this lamp. Now I painted it with chalk paint and did you know chalk paint comes in a spray can. Made this job so easy. You just want to make sure that you use painters tape and you wrap up the socket really well. You don't want to get any paint in there. After it dried I realized you know there is a beautiful bronze color under it so I took some sandpaper and I just sanded the edges and all around the lamp just a little bit to give it a distressed look and then I just sprayed a coat of clear matte acrylic and for like oh my goodness probably $15 I got a great lamp makeover. So don't rethink about a lamp when you're looking at it. Is it worth throwing away or can I give it a makeover? Because there was another lamp that I did and it was a really really brass. I know brass is kind of coming back in style but this one was a really loud brass and I used rust-oleum oil rubbed bronze and spray-painted the base of that one, replaced the lampshade and I was done. So I want to share with you the one thing that I can't live without. I am a lamp person. I have lamps in every room. They create ambiance. They make me happy. Who they don't make happy is my husband when it's time to come to bed because he says it takes him 15 minutes to run around the whole house and turn the lights off. So what we found was this lamp remote. It comes with five of these plugs. You plug in each lamp and check this out. It turns the lamps off. You can even program it to have each little lamp turn off. So who knew it would be a marriage saver. I will put the link below to this awesome gadget. So I hope you enjoyed this video. Be sure to subscribe to my channel because we'll have another video out next week. I hope you have a wonderful day.