Surveyors Tripod DIY

Have you looked into floor lamps lately? Those things are EXPENSIVE! I don't know about you, but I'm really not interested in spending $500 on a lamp. So what did we decide to do? A little DIY, of course. We made a trip over to Midland Arts and Antiques Market a few weeks ago and stumbled upon a really cool surveyors tripod. It was pretty dusty and dirty, but it was made of solid wood and had great height. It even had these awesome metal feet that I just couldn't pass up. We thought it would be the perfect base for a lamp in our living room.

We have wired-up several light fixtures around our house (more details on that to come), so we visited our handy-dandy lamp part supplier, Grand Brass, for some pieces and parts. I wanted to show-off the cord and Tyler suggested red accents, so we settled on this cloth covered wire. We also purchased a very large lamp shade from World Market. If you're looking for lamp shades, I would highly recommend World Market. The quality is great and the prices are low - especially if you wait for a sale or stumble upon a coupon. We got ours for about $30 which was a fraction of the cost of those at Pottery Barn, Crate and Barrel, or Overstock.

We washed the tripod, sanded him down, applied a coat of polyurethane, and wired everything up. The tripod even came with a really cool yard stick that we plan to attach soon. We ended up spending about $130 and couldn't be happier with the end result.