decorating tips for living rooms
today's video that i want to share withyou 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 videolet me talk about first size and placement of your lamps. so this is asideboard and typically when i'm designing i liketo put what's called buffet lamps they're going to be taller and sometimesthey're slimmer it depends on the size of your sideboard. if it's a really bigsideboard you can get away with a bigger base buffet lamp but since this is asmaller sideboard the lamps i chose on here have a smaller base on them and youalso want to pay attention to your
lampshades which we're gonna talk aboutthat in a minute. typically in a dining room you've onlygot your overhead lighting so a lot of times when i'm choosing the design ikind of pull away from a big hutch because i know if i pick a sideboard inthe room i can add more lighting. so another point about tip number one inyour size and placement, a lot of times what i notice is that people when theydecorate with lamps sometimes the lamps tend to be too small for where they putit, sometimes they're too big, in this case although this lamp is pretty andcute it's a little too small for this area so let me replace it with one ithink 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 consoleso the lamp, the base of it, is also narrow, kind of mimics the size of theconsole and this shade is narrow. typically, when you have a small piecethat you're gonna put up against the wall, you can't do a round shape becauseit's going to push the lamp away from the wall. now, i get a lot of questionsabout whether if a lamp is too big and we have artwork on the wall or a mirroror 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 aboutstyle. now this is probably my favorite
tip because i love lamps and i lovelamps because they can be their own artwork so let me show you a few thingsin here. this lamp right here, this is made of cast iron and i can't pick it upwith one hand which i love but let me show you somethingbeautiful black cast iron sitting on top of this distressed wood table. thecontrast is beautiful. another lamp i picked up that i actually like because ithink it's its own artwork. this is an old fire extinguisher that a gentlemanmade for me and made a lamp out of it. it's its own character, it's its ownpersonality, i love it! now i tell you what i'm not usually really really pickyabout lamps as far as they have to be
symmetrical except in the bedroom you'llnotice on each side of this bed we have the same exact lamps. that's where i haveto keep my lamps the same, i don't know why that kind of drives me a littlecrazy. so tip number three, let me talk to you about lamp shades. lamp shades arenow kind of there a lot of them are in linen and a beige color but there aresome coming out now with a little bit of color and i want to show you this lampover here i kind of would call it a blue kind of a blue green but look howbeautiful it looks with the mercury glass base and again, we have a beautifulcontrast of the lamp sitting on a white table. this is a mesh wire shade, i, it'sjust so unique. i mean, this lamp the
distressed metal, everything about it isjust beautiful and it's its own statement piece. so tip number four is about lightbulbs. 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 putbuffet lamps in there now i'm going to put 40 watt bulbs in those because 60and 100 are gonna be too bright and too glaring now if you need a lamp in aliving room or a bedroom and you need it for reading you're gonna need the 60watt or higher but if it's just for ambiance go with the 40 watt also edisonbulbs, very popular now, you can even find them in tons of home-improvement storesthis lamp wouldn't be half as cool if it
wasn't for these tall edison lampsinside. now tip number five, listen, if you've already got a lamp that's kind ofcool and you like the base of it and you like the style of it, give it alamp makeover. if you'll give me just a second i'm going to show you how to dothat. s this is one of the very first nice lamps i ever bought a few yearsafter i was married, fast-forward about 10 or 15 years, and it was a little datedlet me show you before picture. so while it was pretty at the time, the darkbronze and the dark shade just became dated so i decided i'm gonna buy a newlamp but the more i thought about it, the more i thought, this is a great lamp! i'mjust gonna give it a makeover and save
some money. so i replaced the shade withthis lighter linen shade and then what i did was i painted the base of this lampnow i painted it with chalk paint and did you know, chalk paint comes in a spraycan? made this job so easy! you just want to make sure that you use painters tapeand 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 soi took some sandpaper and i just sanded the edges and all around the lamp just alittle bit to give it a distressed look and then i just sprayed a coat of clearmatte acrylic and for like, oh my goodness, probably fifteen dollars, i gota great lamp makeover!
so don't rethink about a lamp whenyou're looking at it, is it worth throwing away or can i give it amakeover because there was another lamp that i did and it was a really reallybrass i know brass was kind of coming back in stylebut this one was a really loud brass and i used rust-oleum oil rubbed bronze andspray-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 alamp person and i have lamps in every room. they create ambiance they make mehappy, who they don't make happy is my husband when it's time to come to bedbecause he says it takes him 15 minutes
to run around the whole house and turnthe lights off. so what we found was this lamp remote. it comes with five of theseplugs you plug in each lamp and check this out,it turns the lamps off! you can even program it to have each little lamp turnoff. so who knew it would be a marriage saver. i will put the link below to thisawesome gadget. so i hope you enjoyed this video, be sure to subscribe to mychannel because we'll have another video out next week. i hope you have awonderful day!