Olive Picking Baskets Turned Into Pendant Lamps

We’ve recently finished our basement. And while it was lot of decisions and made life a little hectic, it was totally worth it! We’re thrilled to have created yet another cozy space for our family to play and grow. The lighting was very important. We have one window in the basement so we needed to bring in a fair amount of light. But we didn’t want all can lights. And we didn’t wan run of the mill pendants. I had a dream to create olive picking basket pendant lights. I had seen it done in a really cool restaurant before and needed it here.

I’m an antique girl. If it’s old, I love it. A piece doesn’t even have to be nice, or expensive for me to like it. Heck, the shrunk that our TV sits on was living it’s life in a barn, covered in what might have been manure, and was on fire at some point in its life. We also had to rebuild it’s internal shelves, but its awesome. So when we began our lighting search, I had this idea in the back of my mind.

Let’s Get Started Shall We?

Sourcing Olive Picking Baskets

I’ve seen different olive picking baskets around in different antique stores. But, the problem is that they are often by themselves. Or, if there are a few, they are in different sizes, shapes, and states of disarray. I was starting to feel defeated when I decided to check out Etsy. It wasn’t long before I fell in love with the shop Eskiden. The pieces here are beautiful, rustic, and just screamed through my laptop. Three of them, in a large size, and in great shape for just $149. I could have paid that per light if I chose something store bought. All in all, to ship them here I ended up spending $282. But it was totally worth it. They came in perfect condition.

Making the Lights

Once we had them, it was time to transform the into olive picking basket pendant lights! This was a bit stressful because I was worried about ruining the baskets accidentally in the process. But everything turned out! We picked these black pendant lights up off of amazon. It gave us the housing and the chord we needed to finish our project.

We used a circular drill bit to cut a hole in the bottom of the baskets. This allowed us to fit the housing and lightbulb inside the basket. It took a little bit of filing and finessing but we got it just right. And this was perfect because our electrician, Frank, was just about ready to install the lighting! He was able to coil the excess chord up and preserve it for us, which means we can adjust the height of these babies should we ever want to.