Goodbye Granny Lamp

So the other night I got the wild hair to finally change our lovely green and gold living room lamps.  You can see in the picture below they were quite granny-rific!

My parents had gifted them to us 3 years ago and ever since then they have been a sore spot with our other living room furniture.

So for the past 3 years I've been mindlessly searching the web for 2 (cheap) lamps that I would love.  I had found a few at target that I'd been mulling over for the past few months but somehow I could never pull the trigger on buying two $40 lamps plus new shades.  All together that would have cost around $120... yikes!

That was when I stumbled upon this post from a fellow blogger... And the little tiny lamp's light bulb went off in my head.  Spray paint them!  It's a cheap solution and I can make them any color I want.

Then it was onto choosing a color.  Two of the three lamps I liked from Target were a dark gray/orb color (the other was wood and that obviously wasn't happening).  I headed to the local True Value to check out the spray paint selection and I was in luck, they had the perfect color!  I picked up a can of X-O Rust Professional Gray Primer, a can of dark gray Rust-Oleum gloss protective enamel spray paint, and some blue painters tape. 

I decided to take it one lamp at a time.  I wasn't sure if my slick metal lamps would hold the paint very well.  I taped off the little shade holder (I'm sure there is a professional term for this), the cord, and light bulb socket.  Then it was prime time!

The primer covered up the gold and green really well.  I let it dry and attacked the lamp with the darker paint.  I stepped back and oh my I admired my pretty new dark gray lamp for about 5 minutes.  I went ahead and did 2 coats of dark gray to make sure all the gold shinyness was covered.

Looking at my new babies I realized the only thing missing was new lamp shades.  I quickly zeroed in on a few choices at Target and decided on a light tan linen with a wavy design.  I thought the wavy design would play off the single dark gray color and the light tan matches our other living room furniture.

Here is the before and after.. 

I'd say that's a pretty awesome upgrade!  And it didn't cost an arm and a leg... All together the whole project cost about $70 for both lamps (including new shades) which saved me a whole 50 buckaroos! And the best part about this project is it is totally customizable.  You could have spray painted these lamps any crazy color your heart desired.