Today I wanted to share my first pre-blog venture into the realm of household DIY. I did this last February so its a few months old, but I managed to transform a really bland light fixture into a classic chandelier for under $50. Read on to learn about my DIY Chandelier project.

When buying a home, unless your fabulously wealthy and can choose exactly what you want, you’re always going to purchase a space that has elements you love and elements that you hate. One of the things I hated the most was the light fixture in my dining room. I don’t have a picture of the original light fixture but here is a picture from the images used in our real estate listing – note our walls are no longer olive green and this is not my furniture 🙂 It’s a bland, boring, builder-grade fixture – I hated it. We’ve since painted our walls Benjamin Moore’s light pewter which made the light blend too much into the background.

My dream was to have a fancy French inspired chandelier like the ones below, but these are expensive and I really did not want to have to hire an electrician to switch out the fixtures. Someday I will buy one of these but for now I will admire from afar —aren’t these just gorgeous ? So elegant and timeless!

From my research I saw that most people were spray painting light fixtures (a great tutorial I considered is here!). The problem was I did not want to take my light fixture down. It was winter, I wasn’t going to spray paint outside, and again, I really really really did not want to hire an electrician. So instead I decided to paint, yes paint, my light fixture. Here is how I made the transformation:

Supplies

• Rust-Oleum’s Oil Rubbed Bronze Paint (qt. size) – $7.94 : THIS is what made this DIY a success. This paint is oil based and dries at a slower rate than latex paint. This way, the paint  has to more time to “settle” which gives a smoother finish that diminishes the appearance of paint strokes. I was so nervous about hand-painting and going against the spray paint trend   – I really didn’t want brush strokes to be visible so I put my faith in this paint.
• Foam Brushes (I went through 3) – $0.67 – Instead of using a brush which would create strokes – I was able to dab the paint over the chandelier giving it a more professional finish.
• Crystal Glass (I bought 2) – $15.00) – I wanted to add some bling and make it look somewhat like my French-inspired dream. So I splurged and bought real crystal glass beads. I considered plastic which was much cheaper, but it also looked exactly that : cheap. Using real crystal glass I think improved the overall look and quality of the final product! I was able to hang the crystal by wrapping picture frame wire around the base of the light mounts and used the hooks on the string to connect everything.

All in all this process took me about 5 hours of work and here are the final results! It’s not perfect but this DIY Chandelier job transformed this light fixture into not only something I could live with , but something that I was proud of. I hope you like it!