Happy Holidays!

December 17, 2022: Hi all. I'm still here, just been very busy (who of us is not?) I'm working on updating Maison Newton bit by bit, it's been awhile since I changed things up. Happy Holidays to all, soon the Winter Solstice will arrive and then the days will start to get longer once again, hooray!

Saturday, January 27, 2018

Another Need (Versus Want) Satisfied: Mercury Glass Lamps

Hola!  Today is the last day in the second January thaw we've had this month.  Sometimes we don't get one at all; this year, we had two!  Today we hit a high of 47 degrees F away from Lake Michigan and it was sunny all day long.  The snow that I awakened to on Monday that had coated everything a week ago Sunday into Monday and turned the city into a winter wonder land:

Shortly after sunrise on Monday January 22, 2018
has all melted away over the past week, leaving just a few tell-tale signs where the sunshine doesn't quit hit yet:

Half an hour to sundown on Saturday January 27, 2018

I finally got the Christmas tree from in front of the living room window wrapped in its white shroud to keep dust and ick off (it's an old full/queen size duvet cover) all the way through the house and down those endless steep basement stairs to China, er, storage in the basement.  The living room has been rearranged back to its usual configuration, but with the new round upholstered tufted ottoman replacing my square wood coffee table.  What a difference that single change has made, it is amazing how different the room looks now!

I made a few other changes to the living room at well.  Since I wanted to keep my elephant lamp in the room, I brought up a round table from the wreck room and parked that near one side of the fireplace.  The elephant lamp now holds court on it.  I added a new pair of matching lamps to the console table that sits behind the sofa in front of the picture window where the elephant lamp used to sit.

I also dug out of storage an old small round glass and "brass" 3-legged catch-all table that I think I paid $10 at a Woolworth's Dime Store years ago (that's how old some of my stuff is, LOL!)  It is light weight and can easily be shuttled around the room to hold drinks and plates when the tray on the ottoman is in use.  More about that in a future post.

I will also be writing more about the trauma and uncertainty of my first decorating - oh, sorry, "styling" -  foray into arranging items on the tray that now sits on my upholstered ottoman.  Oh boy!  Deciding on a Supreme Court nominee would be far easier, let me tell you...

This latest change started last summer, when I began feeling that the living room needed another lamp, not just an accent lamp on top of the fireplace mantel, and I wasn't satisfied with anything in my collection of old retired lamps that seem to breed magically while in basement storage.  What do you do with old lamps that are still perfectly fine, you're just sick of them?  All of them are out of style, or far removed from where my current decorating tastes lie.  I sometimes wonder "What was I thinking?," when I see the sorry troop. 

I settled upon the idea of buying a pair of lamps to anchor the console table and introduce some symmetry into the room, lamps that would fit into my frugal budget and maybe something to satisfy my long-standing itch for mercury glass.

So what did I do one Saturday morning?  I visited Horchow online. 

Now that was an incredibly dumb thing to do.  I LOVE Horchow, and I absolutely CANNOT AFFORD Horchow.  LOL!  But I visited anyway, and fell in love with this lamp:

Genie Glass lamp

This beauty is the Genie Glass lamp in silver, on a square crystal base.  Oh, be still my heart! Cost: $249.00.  Sorry, Horchow.  Genie is more expensive and taller than I wanted in a lamp, a statuesque 31".  But oh my, she is soooooo gorgeous.  Sigh.

So, off on the hunt I went.  And of course, I was frustrated to no end.  I looked for a few days online to no avail, I could not find anything that I thought closely enough resembled Genie.  I found tons of very pretty mercury glass and silver-colored lamps, and of course the more expensive they were, the more I loved some of them.  WHY does that happen?  It's like daydreaming about what Prince William looked like twelve years ago when he still had all of his hair while I'm old enough to be his grandmother.  Yes - I must be warped.

I checked the usual:  Overstock, Wayfair, Kirklands, Penney's (I have purchased several lamps from Penney's over the years), did a Google shopping search, yada yada yada.  I just didn't find anything that really rang my chimes enough to consider buying one, let alone two.  Eventually I ended up at Target's website because I knew they had lamps, catered to a more modern aesthetic in some of their lines (like Threshold) and generally are moderately priced.  I hit paydirt!

I ended up purchasing two Large Mercury Glass Trophy Lamps, at a wee little discounted price of $36.09 each (regular price $37.99).  Right now, though, they are on sale for even less:  $26.59.


I also purchased two large black lamp shades lined in gold for $19.99 each.  They are also now on sale for $13.99 each.  Yikes!  With free shipping, my total bill was around $113 plus Wisconsin's 5.65% sales tax.  I could have bought four lamps and shades for less than the price of one Genie lamp.  Sorry, Genie.  

The lamps are 17" tall; the shades I purchased are 10" high, 13" wide at the top, 15" wide at the bottom a "threaded uno" shade fitter, it snugs down on the lamp socket.  Because of how the shade fits on the lamp, the total height of my base plus shade is 24", they are just the right height.

I tried to copy one thing from Genie - her crystal base.  Glass was more expensive than acrylic, so I purchased 6" square 1/2" thick acrylic bases for the lamps to rest on.  The lamps are open across the bottom, so I wanted to rest them on some kind of base.

Here are my lamps, now elegantly in place on the console table in the living room:


A look at the acrylic square bases I rested the lamps on

The Threshold lamps are a lot different than the model Genie lamp in both shape and cost, for sure.  But I am delighted with them and the touch of sophistication I feel they've brought to the room.  Very happy camper!  

1 comment: