The orb gets ORBed.

It’s been raining like crazy in our part of Pennsylvania. Which wouldn’t be so bad except that it’s happened for weeks now. Every Saturday morning, we’d put the cushions on the patio chairs. And right around noon, we’d have to run them back into the garage because it would start raining. Not cute spring drizzly rain either, but torrential downpour rain, complete with thunder and lightening.

We finally got a break over the weekend and decided to do outdoorsy projects as much as we could. Even our furballs got in on the action.

Jabba’s perch is on the deck.

Margot’s more of a sidewalk girl.

We let our cat, Smokey, wander around in the back yard for the first time ever. We’ve tried supervised outdoor visits before, but we were worried that he would try to squeeze under the fence and make a run for it. But, uh, he’s too old to run anywhere now, so he lounged in the sun for a few hours.

While they bummed around, we worked on the lighting fixture we scored at a vintage shop in northern Pennsylvania:

We hung the pendant on a nail in the garage and ogled at it for a while. It’s the first time we’ve seen it hanging and we were smitten.

We dusted the pendant, inside and out, to get rid of the cobwebs and dust. And then we shook up a can of ORB spray paint.

Let’s talk about this paint for sec. We went through a ton of color possibilities when we decided to paint our pendant — turquoise, navy, grellow, glossy white, bronzey-bronze and more. We decided to go with oil-rubbed bronze for two reasons:

1. We didn’t want it to look cheap/plastic.
   There’s a trend right now of painting objects in bold colors like yellows or blues. It’s cute and it’s fun, but it also makes the object look like it’s made out of plastic. We love the way it looks for some stuff (like Young House Love’s adorbs candlestick!), but not for everything. To us, making this metal lighting fixture look like a plastic lighting fixture just feels wrong. It’ll look like some cheap thing we picked up at IKEA. Especially if we went with glossy white — IKEA looooooves glossy white. We’re not saying we’d never paint something yellow or glossy white. We’re just saying it doesn’t feel right for this particular pendant.
2. We don’t want it to look dated next year.
   We don’t really like following home decor trends. Basically, if everyone is doing it, we won’t. Why? Because next year, the trend will be sooooo-last-year and everyone will be in sooooo-over-it mode. We don’t want to update our space every 2 years. We’d rather set it up so it stays stylish for 10 years. That means setting it up in a way that that makes it hard to figure out when exactly it was decorated. And, more often than not, that means ignoring what’s popular. There’s a saying in the advertising biz: when everyone zigs, zag. (This isn’t relevant just for home decor trends. Tribal tattoos, anyone?)

That’s why we decided to go with ORB instead of something more funky. And we think we made the right choice. Here’s how the pendant looked after one thin, coat of ORB spray:

You can see the little specks of bronze that make the paint look metallic instead of just glossy black. And here it is after 3 thin, even coats of ORB:

The trickiest part was painting the inside:

We basically had to shove the can through the hole at the bottom and squeeze a fist through to spray paint inside. Not the most elegant solution, but it worked!

Here’s the full pendant in all its ORB glory:

We’re still totally smitten with this lighting fixture. It’s a perfect fit for the modern-meets-vintage look we’re going for.

The next step is to get it in working condition again. Currently, the pendant has old wiring:

We’re going to yank it all out and replace it with new wiring. We’re dying to wrap up this project, so we’re visiting a specialty lamp store this weekend to find something that works. Stay tuned for updates!

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