Introduction: How to Upcycle a Floor Lamp Into a Coat Rack

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About: We're Mother Daughter Projects, sharing our DIY adventures as we learn to maintain, improve, decorate, and use tech in our homes.

Steph's neighbor was cleaning the house and offered us an old floor lamp with a built-in table. The seventies lamp did not fit into her current decor. We thought we could do something with it so we agreed to take it!

It languished in the garage for a while until inspiration struck. We thought it could be upcycled into a coat rack which would fit nicely into an unused corner at Vicki's house.

Supplies

Floor lamp with table

PVC pipe

Spray paint

Concrete

Step 1: Watch the Video

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Step 2: Deconstruct the Lamp

We took apart the lamp which unscrewed very easily. We discarded the lamp parts as well as the decorative, curvy stem parts. We are only going to re-use the straight sections of the lamp stem.

Step 3: Add Weight to the Base

The base of this lamp had weight in the bottom but was broken making it unusable. We hot glued a short piece of PVC pipe over the opening in the base and filled around it with quick setting Rapid Set concrete.

Step 4: Measure PVC Pipe and Paint

We are essentially creating a slipcover of PVC pipe to go over the existing straight parts of the lamp. We cut a piece to fit from base to bottom of the table and a second piece from the top of table to the finished height of the coat rack.

We spray painted the parts in a flat black.

Step 5: Etch Table Glass

We are adding a phone charger under the glass tabletop. First, we spray painted the underside and then used a rotary tool to etch a power button symbol onto the top.

Step 6: Assembly

We added coat hooks to the top of the PVC pipe. We pre-drilled the holes and then screwed the hooks into place. We put back the original metal support rod through the base and screwed it into place. We added a section of the straight-sided brass covering to the support rod and then put the first piece of PVC "slipcover" over this. We used Great Stuff to fill the void between the original brass piece and the PVC cover. Next, we added the tabletop and secured that into place with the original hardware. We added the last piece of PVC and repeated the Great Stuff step. We failed to anticipate the need to support the project until the Great Stuff started to harden so we took turns holding the PVC in place!

Step 7: Add the Wireless Charger

We tried a number of complicated methods to add the charger to the underside of the table, but decided black duct tape on the underside worked just fine!

The new coat rack sits in a corner, handy, but out of the way.

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