Laurel Wishbone Lamps

About a year ago we bought a pair of lamps from a vintage store for $125. At the time we were fairly broke and $125 was an awful lot of money, but we both instantly loved them and didn't even think twice about dropping the cash... until we drove away and buyer's remorse set in. Well, we posted a little blurb on the blog about our weekend finds and a reader commented that they looked like Laurel Wishbone lamps. So we did a little research, and sure enough, that's exactly what they are. Suddenly $125 seemed like a great bargain considering that we later found pairs of these selling for as much as $3600.


From what we could gather from our research, it looked like they even had the original shades and wiring. Sounds great, right? Well, it would be if original shades didn't equal kind of smelly, discolored and starting to disintegrate... The burning smell that permeated the room every time we turned them on, wasn't thrilling either. So they sat on our nightstands for the last year as nonfunctional sculptures until we finally got around to repairing them last them week. This is what lamp surgery looks like:

The easy part, of course, was cleaning them up and swapping out the shades which we found on sale @ Lamps Plus (we're going to keep the old ones stashed away too just in case). The harder part was replacing the chord and socket set. Normally it's a fairly simple job, but feeding wires through the exceedingly narrow brass "wishbone" was no easy task on these. It also didn't help that the lamp comes apart into about 20 pieces as you can see above. A couple of hours later though, they look (and smell) like brand new lamps. Here's a little before and after:

Also, I was playing with our new camera lens which I quite love and thus, couldn't decide which photo I liked better, so here's another before and after. AND, it's a bit of a sneak preview of our new bedroom color!