The pole lamp project

 (This is cross-posted from my personal blog at slumberland.org.)

Recently I acquired a mid-century tension pole lamp. The kind that looks sorta like this:

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But mine was free, because it looked like this:
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The sellers dropped it while removing it from the house, so they gave it to me free, and then I had to search for replacement shades and find out how to rewire the thing. The wiring was truly scary and that pole had large sections of rotting electrical tape inside it. Ebay came to the rescue for the shades, and YouTube for the rewiring.
So here’s the result! I rewired it one evening and was actually shocked (pun unintended) to find that it worked! The shades aren’t colored — they are white, but putting colored light bulbs in them gives the colored shade effect — when the lights are on, at least.

I’m really happy with the way this came out. It ended up not being free since I had to buy shades and wiring supplies, but it was a lot cheaper than buying one of these already in good working condition! I am NOT a person who goes around rewiring things and if I can do it, so can you — try it!