Our Craigslist Lamps...

We found a set of lamps on Craigslist. They are in real good shape. The shades are almost perfect. Pretty cool set for only 40 bucks. Here they are as found...

I rewired both lamps and I think they look pretty slick lit up. Here they are in the living room...
Here is a detail shot of the base. The roses are not quite our style but I guess we can deal with a couple flowers. I like them I think they look good.

New Fiberglass Hanging Light...

We had gotten this real big fiberglass shade as a gift from my parents a while ago. Thanks Mom and Dad! Well we didn't have any floor lamps in need of a shade so I made a hanging light out of it. It wasn't real hard to do. The shade is flipped upside down to utilize the bracket. We had a bunch of leftover lightweight plexiglass so I made a diffuser. I just cut it to size and scuffed the plexi with sandpaper to give it a frosted look and help with any glare.

Hung it using a swag cord fed through a couple of stick-on cord organizers so it looks nice an clean in the corner. A couple of very large "U" shaped nails carry the real weight of the shade. I also added a remote controlled light switch because it is too hard to reach either of the actual switches on the lamp or the cord. Pretty slick device. Folks should check them out.
Here it is all lit up. At night it has a nice glow to it. The remote switch I bought has a dimmer function as well which really casts the right amount of light at the touch of a button. This replaced a Target floor lamp which a lot of people have. I think the new light is a nice addition to the living room.

Our Favorite Lamp...

This has to be one of the best lamps ever made. We found this at Tip Top Atomic Shop in Milwaukee. The price wasn't horrible so against our thrifty ways it came home with us. It is in real great shape. It could use some more polish again but it looks great to me. We have had it for awhile...I just was being lazy and didn't take pictures of it until now.

Our Bedroom...

Well, we are pretty much completed in the "master" bedroom so I thought I would share a few pictures. Or bedroom, being on the second level, is kind of a odd shape. The area that the bed sits in has sort of a low ceiling. It is kind of odd and took some getting used to. After bumping your head quite a few times you get the feel of it. It is quite large if you look at some of those bedrooms on shows like Small Space, Big Style. I does have sort a cosy feeling when your in bed. Anyways, lets have a look...
Our bed is the Tate Bed from Crate and Barrel. We fell in love with this bed when we first laid eyes on it. It really does have a Mid Century look to it. At $1300 for the bed alone it was pretty much well out of our price range at the time. Luckily, Molly spotted one on Craigslist for a awesome deal. Around $600 for the bed and a great mattress that was only a couple of months old. We couldn't have beat that price. Being a platform it really does work well in the space.

The Ikea MALM floating night stands are 2nd hand freebies for our friends Coni and Mike. Thanks guys!

I recently whipped up some lime green curtains that have a square pattern similar to our bedding. As simple as they can get.

The rug barely visible in the photo is the Milano Rug which you can see HERE. It is the perfect rug for the space. I love the pattern on it. I would say that it was one of the things we actually paid full price for but that would be a lie. Molly was able to use her employee discount when she worked for a rug store.
I also really loved a quilted bedding set they also sold at Crate and Barrel called their Plaza line. It was also way too much dough for us. Luckily Shopko (of all places) sold a very similar set last season for a fraction of the price. Same look for a hell of a lot cheaper. This season Target is selling a set like it.

This little vintage baby blue panther planter has a home on my nightstand.
This alarm clock was a great gift from Molly. I don't really use it as a alarm clock but it sure is neat. The area where the starburst is lights up when the alarm goes off.
We really needed some lighting in the little space. Luckily, our friend Mrs. J from up north had these vintage sconces that she no longer wanted. The lime green would work perfectly. With a quick re-wire they were ready to go. Unfortunately the lights didn't have any usable shades. I thought I would make my own shades because I couldn't find any cheap shades on the market that would work. While up North we spotted a HUGE fiberglass shade that had seen better days. Of course that ment we could cut it up with no bad feelings. I was large enough to make two shades for new sconces.

I went to the craft store and found some clip-on shades that were on sale. I tore off the crappy pleated material and prepped and painted the shade frames with flat black.

(If you do this, make sure you find a shade frame with vertical supports. It helps a bunch.)

I then cut and disassembled the large fiberglass shade to get it ready for chopping up. I made a paper template for the new shade frames which was kind of a pain. A drum shade style would have been easier to work with. Once I was happy with the template it was as simple as laying the template on the flattened fiberglass shade then tracing and cutting. I left enough extra material to make sure that it would cover the entire frame. It is better to have too much rather then too little. Joined the ends with a quick drying super glue and trimmed up the shade to match the top and bottom.

Next I punched holes for the lacing. I used my leather punch (which doesn't work worth a damn on leather but great for this project) to punch evenly spaced holes. Once the holes are set it is nothing more than lacing the shade with craft store lacing.

TA DA! Two shades for around $35. A similar reproduction shade from somewhere like Moon Shine would have been $48.00 for just one shade! I'm glad we did this instead. The lime green color sure does look neat.

I think they look really cool when they are lit up.

I'm pretty proud of our bedroom. Given how little we were able to spend on it to get the look we wanted. I like the fact that we have to be a little more picky and really find the good deals. It does force us to be a bit inventive when finding things that work. I hope to show a few other rooms when they finally get them "done".

Attic Finds...

Our friend Mrs. J was kind enough to let us take home some of the things in her attic that she no longer wanted...
She had quite a few of these nifty metal and ceramic ashtrays. I scuffed and repainted the metal stand with some flat black.

One of Molly's finds was this turqouise and blue ceramic covered dish.

Though it didn't photograph the best, these clip on shades are pretty neat. They are made of perforated metal. I sanded and repainted them. I also bought new clips and added a new finial (is it really a finial if it is used upside down?) Anyway... Lucky us, we came home with 3 of them.

Up North Cabin...

Last month we went up north to stay at our friend Mrs. J's resort. The resort is not in operation any longer but she lets friends stay in the cabins. The resort started back in the 20's (I think) but there are quite a few Mid Century items in the cabins. I wanted to show everyone some of the cool stuff.

This is the bathroom of our cabin...
What looks like pink tile is actually paneling. The white "grout lines" are cut into the panels giving the look of tile. The white above are also panels. The whole panel sections are trimmed with the aluminum. I thought this was a pretty slick system. I wish I could find some unused panels like this for myself.
I thought this hand painted shower curtain was pretty cool.
Here are the lights in our cabin. They are retractable George Nelson bubble style lights. I had never seen this combination before. Usually Nelson lights are not retractable. They are pretty yellowed and dirty from age. I did tell Mrs. J that if she were to ever get rid of them I would kindly take them off her hands. Not sure how they would clean up but I think it would be worth a shot.

EDIT: I did just find a retractable Nelson light from a 70's catalog...HERE.

Vintage TV Lamps...

I've been kind of tardy here but that is only because I have some cool stuff in the works so stay tuned... but until then...What can I say... I'm a sucker for TV Lamps. I have always wanted a black panther lamp but have not found the right one. I recently found a great site called TV LAMPS.NET

This site is packed full of some wonderful stuff. There is a store, blog, and a ton of information on collecting lamps. I'm impressed. Someone has put in a lot of time on this site and it shows. Be sure to check them out. A lot of eye candy on there.

Green Lamps...

Just wanted to show our newest lamp. We found the funky biomorphic lamp base at a garage sale for 7 bucks. The shade was found at a flea market for $12.oo. The shade is in great shape and has some green hues along with the gold and black pattern. Perfect fit for this lamp. So a little polish, some cleaning, and new wiring an we have a awesome "new" lamp.


Here is another green lamp we have had for awhile. The shade is a newly made item. It fits in well with Molly's large letter postcard collection. The three pictured are only the tip of that iceberg. I think she paid alittle more for this lamp at a store in Middleton but it was just too perfect not to buy.

Vintage Western Baby Room...

You may have noticed that The Addiction has been SLOW lately. Well...
We are expecting our first child within a week or so!


We have spent quite a bit of time on the baby's room lately. I thought I would share what we have done...
Being that we are into vintage style and not really into the cutesy bears and bunnies nursery things. We went with a Vintage Cowboy room (yep, it is a boy). Many childern of the 50's were big time into the westerns and their cowboy heros and thought it would make for a neat room. We wanted a room that he wouldn't grow out of in a year. The cowboy theme is kinda popular right now with expecting parents. That means there is a lot of sets to chose from on the market. The goal was to make a room knowing that we could do this in the DIY style instead of paying big bucks for things we could make ourselfs. The colors we selected were red, light blue, and tans/browns. We found a fabric we liked that had a really neat pattern...

http://www.thefabricfinder.com/GoldingRodeoDenim3.JPG


We also wanted to incorporate our vintage style along with the new made items. If you really shop around you can find some pretty good deals out there. Making a large portion of it really helped with the cost of it. My Mother help out a ton and we thank her a bunch for that.


I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out. Insead of me blabbing on about it, lets take a look...


This is the entry from the hallway...


Here is the entry from the bathroom side. We wanted to keep the wall color simple. We thought about doing a wall in cowboy wall paper but figured that it would get too busy with the fabric pattern. I made the window cornices/valances (or whatever you want to call them) with the fabric for the tan roman shades..

The crib is vintage and has been in Molly's family for a long time. Don't worry, It checks out and won't be a problem...

The crib bumpers and skirt was made by my Mother. She did a great job. Sadly, I couldn't get a very good picture of them. She bought a bumper kit and made them from the cowboy fabric...

My Mom also used a bears and bunnies mobile and converted it to a more appropriate horse mobile. She use the fabric and little toy horses from The Oriental Trading Company...

We picked up these vintage Broyhill dressers off of Craigslist for only $125. They are in great shape and provide a lot of needed storage. The stick pony a gift from my parents and is vintage 1940's. Unfortunately, I didn't get a good picture of the framed photo on the wall. We found the picture of Roy Rogers, Dale Evans, and Gabby Hayes for a whole $2.50 at an antique store. I found the frames for all of the art in the room at St. Vincent De Paul for 2 bucks each. The Roy Rogers picture has a matte I made using cut paper...
I found this old magazine of short stories for $2.50. I liked the cover a lot but the poor magazine was falling apart. I used another frame from St. Vinnies and it worked great because it already had a matte in it. I only backed it with the tan paper and mounted it...
The magazine was too worn to save but it had a bunch of cool line drawings in it. I cut them out and decoupaged them to another St. Vinnies frame...

The cardboard cutouts above the crib are vintage 50's from the Dolly Toy Company. They actually hung in Molly's Dad's room when he was young...

We kept the lighting pretty simple. The vintage lamp was given to us from a family friend a year ago and works perfectly in the room. I had to rewire and refinish the base but its a great little lamp...

The vintage cowboy shade was found on Ebay for a pretty good price...

Another Mom made item is this diper stacker...

This is one of the only built-ins in our house. The shelves hold his books and other collectables. A cool vintage Roy Rogers toy puzzle and vintage turquoise kids cowboy hat look great up there. Of course you gotta have Woody also...

My folks gave us this rocking chair they had since the 70's. So I stripped and painted it red. I made the chair pads for it with a tan faux suede-ish fabric....

I made these braided leather ties for more of a western look...

I'm pretty proud of this one even though it is a crappy picture. I made this hand embroidered pillow based on one of the images from the fabric in the rest of the room. Yeah, guys can sew too! Anyway, I took quite a while to do but I'm happy with it. I will have to take a better picture of it..

I hope everyone has enjoyed our efforts. I'm sure our Son will also.

NOTE: Thank you to everyone for the kind comments! We had fun doing this project. Knowing that it would be a appreciated by us and by Calvin really helped the project along. It really has come out nicely if I do say so myself. We have been adding bits and pieces here and there and will keep everyone posted on any great new stuff.

Thanks again!
Brian and Molly

Recent Finds...

We recently found some great stuff. Here it is...

This plug in bullet sconce is kinda beat up but I think I can make it look a whole lot better. Not bad for $7.


Some more ashtrays. I found the one with legs for a buck. Both need some serious polish.

This magazine rack needs some cleaning up but not bad for $3.50

We found this monster Royal Haeger vase. It matches the other Haeger we have.