I love it when the cheap option ends up also being exactly what I wanted, and that is definitely the case with my new bedside lamps.

My husband and I have a tiny little bedroom.   Here it is after the last makeover, when we downgraded from out larger nightstands to these smaller ones.

Well, you KNOW it was only ever this clean for this picture and the rest of the time those teeny, tiny nightstands were overflowing – both under and on top – with messy, messy stuff.   They just didn’t have enough usable storage and since the lamps sitting on them weighed about as much as the tables themselves, we were constantly knocking them over.  I had some Expedit shelves from Ikea that were no longer being used in the room they were bought for, and I wanted to put them beside my bed.  Since I already had the shelves and the paint, I knew I could do a bedroom makeover for practically free.  The problem is that you couldn’t put a lamp on them.  I began my search for hanging bedside lamps and came up empty handed.  It wasn’t just that I couldn’t find anything in my price range…I couldn’t find anything I liked at all!

One day my husband and I were wandering the aisles of Lowes and came across these little task lights:

If memory serves me correctly, they were $1.99 each.  They come with a clamp that you can remove, and they come in many different sizes (this one was the small one).  Since I had been looking for the perfect hanging light for about a month and was really getting antsy to get on with it already, we decided that for less than $5, we could use these until we could find what we wanted.

The entire light assembly screws out of it, so I removed that, then covered the holes from inside with tape.I wanted the inside to stay silver, so I sat them open-side-down on a flat surface and gave them several good coats of white spray paint.

I loved them already!  The paint gave them sort of an old-fashioned enamel look.  I reassembled the light, then sewed a simple fabric sleeve that would cover the cord (cut the fabric 3-4 times the length of the cord and about 4-5 inches wide).  I had some metal brackets in my garage that I had picked up on clearance from a garden shop.  I screwed them straight into the side of the shelves, and hung the lamps from them.

The search is over!  I love them so much that I’m no longer even looking for a replacement.  They’re perfect!

And I just adore my new, lighter, brighter, neater bedroom!