taking rentership: lighting situation // diy

I haven't done a Taking Rentership post in a while, so to catch you up: We rent our apartment, and we have a love-hate relationship with it. We still want to claim our rented house as our home, while still staying true to our rental contract (aka don't destroy the place).

There have been a few times we've deviated from that plan, and this is one of them. 

This is the tale of our dining room chandelier. It was awful. Here's proof: 

Okay, not terrible, but NOT to our taste. At all. I figured this one would be an easy thing to change; swap out the fixture, replace it when we move out! No problem there.

I had to show Tim a few pictures of the kind of look I was thinking, but he was onboard immediately. Off to the Habitat for Humanity ReStore we went!

Teeny photo via Habitat.org

Side note: I love this place. Not only do they have an AWESOME selection of pretty much anything you can think of, but you're supporting a really great cause when you shop there. So there's that.

We were hoping for fantastic deals on some antique chandeliers, but didn't know what to expect. Turns out that these were all at minimum half-off what we were finding at Home Depot. The one we found? Originally priced at fifty bucks, marked down to thirty-five.

We got it for thirty, because that's how Tim rolls. He was pretty excited about it.

(They even threw in a free glass lampshade-thingy because they liked us--it's perfect for a tealight. Score!)

So, this brassy chandy had seen better days. It was missing most of its bulbs, the brass was scratched and dirty, and the wiring was a little frayed. All fixable! We bought new wiring and a longer chain from which to hang it, picked up some shiny new bulbs, and wiped the whole thing down with some ammonia cleaner. A few coats of paint and we were good to go. 

We used Rust Oleum's Appliance Epoxy. This stuff was fantastic! It is oil-based and formulated to be sprayed directly onto metal without primer, so it's stuck on there solid, and the shine on that bad boy? Gorgeous. We couldn't be happier. 

Hello Gorgeous. You turned out better than we could have hoped.

 

If you look closely, you can see some of the other updates we've made to the kitchen area! Can't wait to show you those :)

What do you think; is our landlady going to kill us? ;)

Nifty Thrifty Thursday at Coastal Charm, Tuesday's Treasures at Uncommon Slice Of Suburbia, Wow us Wednesday at Savvy Southern Style, Be Inspired at Elizabeth and Co