Let's Be Enlightened!

The crown jewel of most dining rooms is the chandelier.  My remodeling budget at this point was more like rhinestones than crown jewels.  I did lots of looking around for a bargain.  First I went to a great flea market in Savannah called Two Women and a Warehouse.  They can usually be counted on for some funky, fun finds--and they did not disappoint.  I found this cool chandelier with 

strands of turquoise....

It was nice but a bit too small. 

I spent some time looking at online sources.  No luck with Craigslist or eBay but I checked on Etsy and found a vendor who made these fun pieces with canning jars.....but at $385.00 I had to pass them up.

 Here are three of my faves from Shades of Light--one of my all-time favorite sources.

I would have loved one of these especially the jute one (on the far right above) but they were way too pricey sooo.... I kept looking and found this gorgeous oyster shell chandy from

Low Country Originals...

 So many pretty things--so many expensive pretty things.  It became clear to me that I was going to have to buy an inexpensive chandelier and rework it so that is what I set out to do.  I found these great chandeliers at Home Depot that were more in my price range.

 

But the chandelier that really caught my eye was this one from Home Depot...

The glass beads could be replaced with strands of shells and it would be easy to spray paint the gold-tone metal before putting the shell strands in place.  At $169.00 it was more affordable so I decided to take it home!

Here is what it looked like after being sprayed with Rustoleum Painter's Touch Ultra Cover 2X satin finish spray paint in Aqua.  The electrician had just finished hanging it and he hooked the chain to make it shorter so the workers would not hit their heads as they worked.

It was time to get busy embellishing the chandelier.  I'll show you what I did next time!