Big Daddy

My dad's birthday was coming up while I was getting into building the pipe lamps, so I decided I'd make him one for his birthday. I'd be visiting my parents for the 4th of July weekend so I could bring it up with me.

I decided to make a lamp with a base made out of marble. Chase had rescued some marble scraps from the dumpster at work for me to use for lamps, and I hadn't tried using any yet. White marble isn't really my style, I prefer darker tones, but I realized if the dimmer handle was white, it would compliment the marble base really nicely. I reached out to the company I buy the dimmers from to ask if they could do white, and they agreed to give it a shot, though they'd need to special order the paint so it would be a little upcharge. I knew it would look amazing though so I went for it. The company tried a couple types of paint before settling on the best one, and then when they were packaging them, the paint scraped off really easily. They were going to throw in the towel, but the tiny scrapes (showing the red handle underneath) were very minor, and I thought could even look more authentic, so I had them send me the order anyway. I bought three white dimmers just to make best use of the special-order paint, and to use for other lamps I chose to make with marble bases.

I also decided I wanted to try painting a lamp. Up to this point I had just been leaving them with their natural pipe color. I thought a darker color to contrast with the white marble would be cool.

All the parts but the dimmer arrived (this was while the company was trying to find a good white paint to use) and I was excited to put it together, but without the dimmer piece it couldn't fully come together, so I took a picture while I held the top hovering over the bott0m to get an idea of what it would look like. I also decided on the dimensions of the marble piece (I just needed to see how wide it ended up on the top) and outlined where the cuts and holes should go. Chase took the marble to work to get it cut and drilled.

The marble and dimmer were ready around the same time, so I wired up the lamp and taped it to the base so I could fully see how it came together. It looked great!!!

I planned to use special screws to attach the pipe to the base, but all the screws I found were much longer than was appropriate for the thickness of this marble. I eventually found slightly shorter screws, but they still ended up being just a little too long; they stuck out the bottom, which was frustrating. I decided to put on some adhesive furniture pads (those little pieces of felt you can stick on the underside of furniture so it doesn't scrape the floor). I poked a hole through them and then lined the hole up with the screw tips. But the amount the screws stuck out from the marble was more than the thickness of the felt pads, so I had to double them up. At this point it doesn't look nice at all, but it was the bottom of the lamp, so who's going to see it?

The last order of business before painting was to solder the wires coming out of the lamp to the wire that would plug into the wall. On future projects, I took care of this attachment within the lamp itself, but in this case, I picked the wrong size for the middle hole in the marble for the wire to go through and the wire with the plug on the end was too thick to fit through. I used single wires with thin insulation, one for hot, one for neutral, and was just able to squeeze them through the middle marble hole. I usually use wire nuts instead of soldering to make the wiring attachments, but in this case the connection would be visible, so I had to solder. I also bought heat shrink tubing to cover the joint after it was soldered (electrical tape would have looked messy). The end result was lumpier than I liked, but it got the job done and if you didn't know it was there, you'd never notice.

If you look close, you can see that the concrete screws I ended up with are BLUE, which is funny... I knew I was painting it so it wasn't a big deal, although the floor lamp in our bedroom (see Gothic) still has the blue-colored screws visible. It's subtle and totally fixable, but I had better things to do, hah!

It was time to paint! I bought some thick black plastic sheeting to use to keep paint off other stuff, and I made a little tent-style thing in the corner of our patio (on top of a big storage bin) to contain the spray as best as possible. It wasn't pretty, but it did the job. Below you can see the blue screws even more clearly before the paint went on.

I picked a "hammered" black paint by Rustoleum so it wouldn't rust in the future. I was nervous; I hadn't spray painted before and I wasn't sure if it would be more or less forgiving than painting a bedroom, which I'd done several times before (and found myself frustrated with the imperfections). I was relieved to find it was much more forgiving! The wet paint sort of melted into itself where my spray strokes overlapped, instead of looking like obviously separate passes. I was also stoked at how great it looked after I finished the painting! It was still wet, but I could tell the hammered look was very realistic and the whole lamp generally looked great in a uniform color. Below is a shot while the paint was wet, plus shots once it had dried (at least, that side).

I didn't wear gloves this first time around, and I ended up with paint on various parts of my skin that did NOT want to come off. It eventually did, but it took a few days. No one noticed my new black freckles though.

Once I had gotten all sides sufficiently covered, I had to let it dry for 2 hours before handling it. Of course I was impatient, so I admitedly didn't wait the full two hours before I brought it back inside and set it up to see how it turned out. The paint didn't come off on my hands or anything, so I might have gotten lucky.

And that was that! Time to gift it!

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