Let there be light!

Well the title says it all really. Last weekend, with the help of Steve, we built a lamp! I'd been wanting to DIY a lamp since seeing a post on Pinterest where a lady had constructed her own lamp from a water jug. I have been scouring ebay and antique stores for something similar and it was at Paddington's Antique warehouse where I spotted this amazing vintage soda stream. 

For a tidy $30 I purchased the heavy soda vessel. I really liked the industrial feel of the steel criss-cross effect on the outside but my favourite part was the attachment at the top. 

I'd done a little research to find a DIY lamp kit and found Bunnings sold pendant light kits but I not the simple lamp kits. By a happy coincidence I stumbled across a Beacon Lighting store and it was a case of ask and yee shall find! For about $30 a got a clear lamp cord, bulb kit, bulb and lamp shade. 

I needed Steve's help with the assembly of the lamp as we decided to cut into the top to affix the lamp shade.

Cue the power tools....

Now Steve will find just about any excuse to use power tools. If you were making a lamp out of a water jug or vessel with an easier opening there would be no need for power tools at all. 

Once he grinded away the top disk, it was just a matter of cleaning out the inside mechanisms with a drill to make room for the lamp cord. 

The next fun part- drilling into the glass bottle to make a hole to pull the cord back out to plug into the wall. This is not an essential step if you have a vessel with a wide opening. You can simply fold the cord back out the top and hide it behind the jug, especially if you have purchased a clear cord kit.

Of course this step was reason enough for Steve to go out and purchase a glass drill bit. Determined not smash the glass he practiced on a wine bottle. 

Drilling into glass is best done at a low speed, and by low I mean really low! Patience is definitely needed at this point. 

We may have been a little over-paranoid but this step still took a good 25 minutes as the bottle was deceivingly thick- about 15mm thick!

Once the hole was complete it was very simple. Thread the lamp cord through the bottom hole and up towards the top. With a little help from a coat hanger the cord was through. With our lamp base it was a matter of loosening two screws to place the copper electrical ends into the base and then tightening them. Then place the lamp shade over the base, plug in the light bulb and voila! 

LIGHT!

I'm not ashamed to say I did a happy dance when it all came together! It looked so great! 

We'll admit it was slightly over-engineered with drilling into the top soda stream fastening but I'm so glad we did. The industrial look gives it a really masculine, chic feel. Which is perfect, as Steve has laid claim on the lamp as his bedside light!

Without the power tools steps this project would actually take no longer than 10 minutes. If you have a water jug, demijohn, or a great vessel that you want to up cycle - DIY a lamp! You won't regret it!

Deck be Done!

It's taken four full weekends, but we can now proudly say we have built a deck! We can't say it's been easy and not back breakingly difficult at times, but we can certainly say we've enjoyed the challenge and are just a little bit chuffed with our very first serious renovation project.

Last weekend we put in some seriously hard yards to finish laying all 54 rows of timber- pre-drilling more than 1500 holes before individually screwing them all into place.




It wasn't without hiccoughs! One of the timber bearers was slightly bowed so when we tried to lay down the pattern of the timber there was a very large bump in the middle. Thankfully Steve was able to "borrow" a planer from his work which saved us several hours of sanding (we probably wasted about an hour trying that option)


And then of course, we had the inevitable situation of getting down to the final few rows and realising they wouldn't fit without halving the width of one of the rows. We had to get all McGuyver and create a means of cutting it without a table saw and without a table. The result was nothing short of genius! (if we may say so ourselves). We screwed a circular saw onto a pallet! Simple but effective.

But probably the greatest little invention was Steve's spacer device. We needed a way to create a spacer between the timber rows. Turns out all we needed was a piece of wood and a nail!

All in all we're pretty happy with the result. While there are still some other things we want to add - like a step at the end leading into the garden, a bar ledge kind of like this, some screening to match the rest of the house, add some lighting like this and then of course we have to furnish it!

Check out the before and after pics!