Chandelier

A while back, I got it into my head that I would like a chandelier (because I'm weird). So I started looking in thrift stores, flea markets, etc. Everything I found had to be hard-wired into the ceiling, and visions of me frying myself while trying to monkey with electrical wiring made me look into the plug-in type, all of which were either ugly or too expensive. Then one day I was at the local CrapMart and found a chandelier on sale for seven bucks!

Now, this seven dollar job had to be hard-wired too, but by this time I was thinking that maybe I didn't actually need the light from the chandelier (my apartment is always lit up like a runway at O'Hare from the existing lighting because my eyesight is going to crap as I get older), but rather what I was interested in was the shape and the idea of a chandelier (I can talk myself into anything.).

As an aside, these CrapMart chandeliers were in an aisle marked as "college dorm furnishings". Which made me wonder why on earth you would send a kid off to a college dorm with a chandelier that had to be hard wired into a ceiling.

So anyway, I bought the CrapMart chandelier and went to work. Here's the before (the prisms were still wrapped in plastic):



And here's the after:



I painted it, bought new prisms on e-bay, added on some glass fish I already had, and plopped a parrot in the middle. The colors are a little too nursery-room for me, and I'm looking for something other than a beanie-baby parrot for the centerpiece, and the whole thing needs some tweaking to make it more interesting/less babyish. Any ideas? (Other than throwing the whole thing off the back porch, that is.)