One of the projects I’ve been working on over the last couple of months is updating the small sun room in the front of my house. This room has been my nemesis over the years, so it’s not surprising that my West Elm DIY Bentwood Pendant project did not go according to plan.
I’ve been eyeing the West Elm Knock-off Tutorial made famous by Tasha over at Designer Trapped. My style is eclectic, but definitely leans more to vintage/cottage, so I’ve been making a conscious effort to work a few contemporary pieces into each room. Somehow I never replaced this original light fixture in the sun room, so I thought it would be a good candidate for Tasha’s project.
Can you believe how ugly this is??!?? Holy crap…
For instructions on how to do this project, head over to Tasha’s blog HERE. She’s got a complete list of materials, sources and detailed directions. Today I’m adding a few tips and helpful hacks that I came up with to make this work with my particular set of (unfortunate) circumstances.
West Elm DIY Bentwood Pendant Debacle
The project itself is not really hard, but there a few things I discovered along the way:
Issue #1: When you’re cutting your embroidery hoops in half, you need to be REALLY careful to cut them evenly. I thought I was being careful, but someone somehow I ended up with a couple that weren’t even, which made the end result noticeably cock-eyed. My light fixture looks a little drunk, and it made every step after that more difficult.
You have to carefully pry the blocks off the hoops, which is really difficult to do without damaging them. As Tasha mentions in her tutorial, you can just put the bad side on the top where it won’t be seen.
Mine were in pretty bad shape and it presented Issue #2.
Tasha states that you can use glue or not when you’re attaching your hoops. We (stupidly) opted not to and just used the nail gun to attach the hoops to the circles, but because some of the hoops were in such rough shape, they kept popping off. We ended up gluing and clamping several of them after the fact, so I would suggest making a pre-emptive strike and gluing all of them in the first place as you’re nailing it together.
Since my house was built in 1924, this crusty mess is what we were faced with when we took down the old fixture. Not really surprising, and thankfully the DRG is a pretty decent electrician – I wouldn’t touch this with a 10 foot pole.
Once the old fixture was down we mounted the new pendant kit and Issue #3 presented itself:
I knew I would have to do some touch-up on the ceiling because of the size difference in the fixtures, but unfortunately, the old ring showed right through the paint AND the primer.
I decided to buy a medallion to cover the whole mess up. I’m not a huge fan of them, but it was the best option given what I was working with. Of course, the marks on the ceiling were just large enough that I couldn’t use the 10″ medallion, I had to go with the 16″ version.
The only saving grace to the whole thing was that I bought my pendant kit at Lowe’s and the medallions were made by the same manufacturer and had the same finish. If I had to try and spray paint them to match it would have pushed me right over the edge.
But wait…there’s more!
Issue #4:
Tasha used twine to attach her pendant to the bentwood fixture. She is a better woman than I, because I couldn’t get it to hang correctly to save my life – though I think it was in part because of how crooked my fixture was. So I came up with another solution.
I had an old clamp-on utility light in my basement. As you can see, the cover has seen better days, so I didn’t mind sacrificing it for this project. I took a pair of tin snips and cut it down to make a collar for the fixture. I figured I could paint it brown and mount it onto the pendant and it would hold the wooden part of the fixture up.
Thinking I was a DIY GENIUS, I put it all together and stood back to check it out. With the collar hanging the way it normally would at the base of the bulb, the whole thing hung too low and it looked pretty stupid.
I will confess – at this moment I considered punting the whole thing football style out the front door and directly to the curb.
After I took a couple of deep breaths (and a good slug of my wine), I cut a slit in the collar and mounted it above the little manual switch on the pendant. The switch holds it up in the right position and I closed it back it up with a bit of electrical tape.
It’s one of those projects that I messed around with so much that I’ve completely lost perspective, so I’m not even sure how I feel about it.
Would I do it again?
Hmmmmm……probably yes.
It’s a very cool look and different from most of the stuff I have in my house, plus with fixtures being insanely expensive, the price is right. Because I had to buy the medallion, mine came in a bit more than Tasha’s, but my West Elm DIY Bentwood Pendant Knock Off is still a fraction of the original at $200.
Plus – I worked HARD for this one. The fact that it’s even functional and still hanging in the sunroom should probably put it in the “win” column.
If I had to do it again, I would be A LOT more careful overall (notice the swoosh of stain I got on the light bulb trying to make the string work), and I might even buy a couple of extra embroidery hoops just in case.
Sometimes the DIY Gods just aren’t smiling on you, and you have to roll with it. 🙂
I’m linking this project up at some terrific blog parties – you can find my complete list of places I party HERE.
