A Lamp Dilemma

Soooo, the bedroom is rearranged the way I want it and although it's a little funky looking with the bed poking out from a corner at a strange angle (it's not centered on the corner, but off-kilter, sorta like me) I like it, I like it! 

Redecoratitis had a hiatus yesterday while the ladies of the investment club were here, and then I had a friend come over with her computer -- she was having issues with it and I offered to see if I could get it up and running for her again.  Couldn't - major motherboard issues it appears.  So, her 3-year old Acer is dead and she's out of luck because the Acer schmucks won't replace the defective motherboard despite it being a well-known issue from a batch of computers they shipped in 2008 (the year she bought it), since she is no longer under warranty.  If it were me, I would seriously consider hauling Acer's butt into small claims court in Milwaukee County.  They have to have a registered agent in the USA and it's simple enough to track down who it is; I'd pay good money to have that registered agent served with a small claims Summons and Complaint, ha!  You bet I would!

I do not plan on replacing the two "boudoir" lamps on my triple dresser.  They are wood and have light brown (or, if you prefer, dark tan) shades.  Well, they're not "boudoir" lamps, strictly speaking; they're buffet lamps I bought online for real cheap!  But I like how the look on the dresser.

So, I've got the new lamp I bought from Penney's on the nightstand.  It's shade is really dark brown and if I want to stick with my "idea board" (which consists of half a dozen pics printed off the internet from searches for "black and white bedrooms"), that cute little lamp doesn't go in the direction I want to go in at all!

The lamp isn't crooked, but this picture sure is, whew! The photo quality isn't the greatest either; I took these pics at night using the "scene" mode on my camera (yep, still on "scene" mode).    Notice my genuine vintage princess phone in grunge beige!  Yeah, I still have actual telephones in the house - no cell phone for moi.  So, you can see from this "close-up" that the shade really is pretty dark brown, and the faux marble body is, well, brown speckled.  The rest of the lamp is antique bronze (now they call it "oiled bronze finish.")  All in all, a very brown statement. 

It looks great with the wood color (even the plastic wood color) of my bedroom set.  I'm not going to be painting that set, either!  No white or black paint will besmirch the pristine, dented and somewhat faded beauty of my bedroom set! 

What to do, what to do?  I pulled out the lamp from the guest bedroom that sits on top of the bookcase next to the wing chair and took it on a test run in my bedroom:

I tried to get this photo at the same angle as the top photo, but this shot is a lot closer to the night stand.

And a close-up of the guest room lamp:

It's got swing-arm action.  It's not a white-white, it's sort of a creamy white.  Hmm...  Of course, with about 250 million different shades of white, it's going to be nearly impossible to get a room where some of the whites don't clash, I suppose.

I moved the new Penney's lamp into the guest room, but it takes up more visual "space" than this lamp, and so if I keep it in there I will have to re-hang the pics that are on the wall above the bookcase so things look more in balance (it's just a two-shelf case that provides room for books and storage as well as a convenient surface next to the chair.  Actually, the guest room set-up makes more sense than my bedroom set-up!) 

I'm torn right now, not sure if the guest room lamp is the right fit for my bedroom; it looks slightly out of scale to the night stand.  Since the lamp has a painted finish to begin with, I wouldn't feel any qualms about spray painting it a whiter white or trying black on it to see what it would look like.  But only if I decide it fits in my bedroom better than in the guest room.  I would hate to paint it white white or black black, and then have to repaint it again because I want it back in the guest room!  What a lot of work that would be for nothing.

I also have two very old junky lamps wrapped in plastic bags, stashed in the basement.  Either one could be painted, but the shades, oh my, the shades!  I would need a new shade and depend upon it, I always go for a shade that costs more than I'm willing to pay.  Argggghhhhh.   One I painted a couple of times, at least, after I ripped the old wallpaper off of it.  Yeah, it's been through several remakes already; one is so old I actually bought it from Woolworth's when they were still in business and it's not a cloth shade at all, it's wrapped in some kind of plastic material!  Honest -- although you can't tell it's plastic unless you feel it; it looks sort of "silky." 

Well, I shouldn't be fretting about lamps right now anyway; I've got a canopy to hang!  And then I have to figure out what, if anything, I'm going to put on the walls.  With the bed poking out from that odd angle into the room, it's really broken up the wall space so there is no clear vision now of where to hang art/pics.  And once the canopy is up, that will obscure things even more...