DIY Chandelier Hack

How many times have you had an idea of something you wanted and just KNEW it was completely out of the budget? This is pretty much my daily life. Kind of like my TV stand, remember that? Well it was no different for my dining room chandelier. I have a huge 10 seater dining room table (also a poker table) that needed a huge matching chandelier. c Things need to be proportionate, y’all (<–remember that).

My table is rectangular and I thought a big rectangular chandelier would balance it out nicely. And a chandelier isn’t a chandelier in my house unless it has bling. Lots of bling. So in my head was this huge rectangular blingy chandelier. And once it’s in my head, it’s not going away. I looked online at my usual lighting websites like lampsplus.com and wayfair.com and I came across ones like this.

$1,238.54

$991.91

$877.91

These are EXACTLY what I was picturing in my head. Perfect, right? WRONG. Those prices are so, SO wrong. I headed to Lowe’s and then to Home Depot. They usually have really good prices, just not a big selection. I couldn’t believe it, but I saw this huge guy and knew it had the potential to be something great. The most important thing was that it was the right size; rectangular and over 30″ in length. I wasn’t crazy about the silver hardware, but it was going to have to work, especially with a price of only $169!

Now I just had to figure out how to add the bling. Call me crazy – but a few years ago when I worked at Target, I saw these Christmas ornaments and fell in love with them. I had no idea what I was going to use them for or why I had to have them, but I did. (I envisioned an entire tree done in these in one of our rooms!) So I watched them like a hawk and then finally the day after Christmas they went 50% off. So I loaded up. And by loaded up I mean I drove to every Target in a 20 mile radius and bought them out. I ended up with probably 80 or so which cost me $60. Here they are:

So naturally I knew these were going to be the PERFECT addition of bling to my new chandelier. I convinced myself (or my husband) that I KNEW I bought these for this specific purpose!

If you aren’t able to find those since I bought them a few years back, I also saw these at Lowe’s that I think would work great also.

I used some crafting wire I had in my scrapbook supply closet and some wire cutters to attach each ornament onto the chandelier. The silver scrapbook wire looked pretty similar to the links on the ornament itself so it matches and looks like it was actually part of the ornament.

As you can see in the picture below, I just looped the wire around the bar, twisted and cut off the excess. I didn’t really know how many I was going to use, I just kept putting them on until it satisfied my bling craze! Of course I evened it out and made it symmetrical on all the bars. I ended up using only about 17 of the ornaments, which costed $12.75. Don’t worry, I have other projects in mind for these guys! I’ve already used a couple dozen more in my kitchen, which you will see soon!

Here’s the finished product! $169 chandelier and $12.75 on the ornaments for a total of $181.85. Much better than those crazy expensive chandeliers above and it fulfilled that image in my head perfectly!