How do you wire a lamp?

You are walking through your favorite flea market or antique mall and you see a lamp that would look great in your house or apartment.  You start to look at it to see what kind of shape it’s in, and you notice the cord is frayed.  How do you change it so that you can use the lamp?

The first thing you need to find is a replacement cord.  A local home improvement store will more than likely have a replacement for you.

The next thing that you need to do is to disassemble the light socket so that you can get access to where the cord attaches.

When you get the main cover of the socket off, you will notice that the end of the cord that you are going to replace is held on by a couple of screws.  All you need to do is to unscrew the cord and slide the cord out at the base of the lamp.

A piece of advice: I would look at the socket before I did anything else.  I’ve seen sockets with rust, corrosion and damage to where it would be unsafe to turn the lamp on.  If there’s anything wrong with the socket, it’s a good idea to replace it now.  More often than not, you’ll get a replacement socket when you buy the cord. 

When you purchase a new cord at a home improvement store, it will have the end of the cord already stripped for you so that you can reattach it without having to worry about stripping the wire.  After you get the new cord on, pull on the cord at the bottom of the lamp to remove all of the extra slack that you gave yourself.

Installation of the cord is just as easy as removing it.  The first step is to feed the cord through the lamp in the area where you removed the old one.  When you get the cord all the way through the lamp, leave yourself a little extra room so that you can attach the light socket.

After you take out the extra slack in the cord, all you have to do is to put the cover on the light socket.  If I were you, I would put a light bulb in it and plug it in to see if it works before I did anything else.

When it works, you can put on the lamp shade and proudly display your latest find.  What kinds of finds have you run across that needed a little repair work like this?