everything’s a story

So I inherited some lamps from my grandfather’s office last week.  Or, actually, I just claimed them out of my mother’s garage.  They came from this awesome building: my grandfather’s building materials company.

My mom found the lamps in a storage room there a few years back, and she gave them a home in her garage, but they were pretty beat-up, and nobody really wanted them.

Actually, they were very beat-up:

But, inspired by the before & after pages at Design*Sponge, I got this idea that I could bring them back to life.

So I taught myself how to re-wire a lamp, and I scavenged some matching lampshades–also from my mom’s garage.

I didn’t recognize the shades at first, but after I tore off the ribbons at the top and bottom, I realized these were the shades that sat on either side of my parents’ bed my whole childhood.  (Sorry, Mom!)

True, they were way too dated to use as they were.  So if I hadn’t fixed them up, they’d still be in the garage.  But I did feel a little twinge of regret once I realized that I knew those lampshades.  Because once I’d torn the ribbons off, they were kind of gone forever.

Then I painted the lamps black, and they became gone forever, too.

And then I Mod Podged a really fantastic and gorgeous fabric by SwankySwell onto the shades.

And voila!  New lamps!  Until the cat knocks them over, or the kids use them to build a fort.

I do miss my grandfather.  And I miss the house I grew up in where those lampshades used to be.  And I know that having these re-done DIY lamps in my house won’t bring either of them back to me.  But when I look at the lamps, at the very least, I’ll remember where they came from.