Hi friends! I recently filled you all in on a business venture I’ve been hard at work on, The Listening Room at 443. (I wrote about it HERE if you’re interested). My goal with this project has been to use my DIY and ninja-bargain hunting skills to decorate the room as inexpensively as possible. There are a lot of things we have to buy that are pricey, like the bar equipment and the sound and light gear, so I was determined to create a super-cool space on the smallest budget possible. Today I’m going to share my DIY Drum Chandelier project that I came up with to camouflage some reeeeeeeally ugly light fixtures.
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The room had a variety of lights when we started working on it – track lighting, rope lighting in the recessed areas, recessed cans… and these lovelies:
With the conduit being exposed on the ceiling, removing them would have been a bigger project than we were interested in tackling. Also, there is so much lighting in the room that I didn’t think they would even be turned on very much. I started investigating cost-effective ways to disguise them.
There are six of them, so even a modestly priced cover-up would add up to big bucks quickly, so I puzzled over it for several months.
My first solution was something I stumbled onto online quite by accident.
These sari chandelier lanterns were on clearance for $4.80 each. They are supposed to be beige, but when they arrived they were actually white. I hung them up and lived with them for a few weeks, but I just didn’t love them. They were too sheer and didn’t hide the ugly fixtures at all, plus they hung a bit too low.
My gut feeling was that I needed something a little more tailored, but with a “fun” factor. I decided to try my hand at stringing crystals on a regular drum lampshade. I had a stash of them from an old project that I never ended up doing, so the next order of business was to locate some inexpensive drum shades.
THAT turned out to be way more challenging than I thought.
I scoured the internet but didn’t have a ton of luck, because I just couldn’t spend $50+ for each shade. I have to admit I was getting discouraged. We don’t have very many home decor stores in Syracuse, but we did recently get an atHome store, and luckily they had exactly what I was looking for.
These shades were $20 each AND they had 6 of them. Whew!
The next step was stringing the crystals onto the shades. I made this up as I went along, but once I got the first one figured out they came together really quickly.
I had strings of crystals:
You can order them HERE. (affil link)
And some teardrop-shaped larger crystals on a short string.
You can order them HERE. (affil link)
I found a longer matching teardrop at a local craft store, so I decided to use the long teardrop in the center and the shorter ones around the perimeter.
I used jewelry wire to secure the crystals to the frame cross pieces. My plan was to hang the drum upside down with crystals attached to what would normally be the top of the shade.
Next, I had to mount the shades onto the light fixtures. I flipped the shades around and carefully poked a very small hole into the shade in 2 spots across from each other. I ran the wire through and used it to lash the shade to the conduit. This is MUCH easier if you have a second set of hands, BTW. 🙂
It wasn’t a terrible project, surprisingly, and I’m fairly happy with the results. At some point, I would love to replace them with some fabulous, handcrafted Etsy creations, but in the meantime, they will do just fine.
You could probably use this DIY Drum Chandelier technique for disguising all kinds of ugly ceiling fixtures, don’t you think?
