Changing the pendant shades is something I like to do.  The quirkier the better!   It all started with me seeing an old rectangular bucket (for lack of a better word) in a flea market.  I didn’t think much about it at the time, but when I got home I realized “hey, I could make a shade for the pendant lights with that”!  Well damn, the thing was gone when I got back to purchase it.  I searched high and low but couldn’t find anything similar.

I started hunting for new ones.  The largest I could find, other than one that would have been way too big, was the Behrens 5.5 Galvanized Tub in Lowe’s.  $14.99.  Bingo!

I didn’t want it to look new, but aged.  After doing a little research, the best way to give it the aged look was none other than toilet bowl cleaner!  Yup, you read that right.  You douse it with the cleaner, let it sit, rinse it off and voila’!   I actually left mine outside in the sun for a couple days.  I would have liked a little more patina, but this still looks aged.  No doubt, knowing me, I’ll take it down and try to age it a little more!

To mount the tub into the existing lights wasn’t difficult at all.  Ideally, instead of three hanging lights, two probably would have been better, but I didn’t want to buy anything.

I took the existing “shades” off the lights and held the tub up and made marks where the holes needed to be.  I knew I needed 1″ holes by measuring the opening of the end of the light:

The right hole that I drilled doesn’t look even in this picture, but I promise, it is.

We then put the ends of the lights through the holes and screwed the ends on that hold the shades on.  (goodness, did THAT make sense at all???)  Here’s a picture of it after I screwed the bulbs back in:

Here’s a closer look at the new “shade”