Chris and I have been meaning to get a floor lamp for the living room for months now. 

As you may recall, furniture shopping is not at the top of the list of things we love to do. In fact, it isn’t even on the list. 😉 So, having spent so much time early on in Tübingen in pursuit of the essential furniture our apartment required, we have subsequently kept procrastinating on doing any kind of lamp shopping.

But, Stan and Judie are now visiting us, and the other day they kindly offered to help find a floor lamp that would provide adequate light in the living room to read by.

Of course, since the living room is also the guest room, they have also seen firsthand how inadequate the current single overhead light was for reading for any length of time.

So, it was great for us to get some expert help when finding a lamp. Stan and Judie actually know what they’re doing when it comes to looking at lamps, unlike Chris and I. In search of the perfect — or at least acceptable  — floor lamp,  Stan, Judie and I took 2 buses today to get out to Toom, the Home Depot-like store where we’d bought the overhead light fixtures way-back-when in September.

At Toom, we found one that had most of Stan and Judie’s recommendations for features: a tall floor lamp with a high wattage bulb  for enhancing the light in the overall room, plus a little second light that is included as part of the floor lamp, which is low wattage, but suitable for reading by. The lamp we found had no dimmer switch, though, which was also on the wish list. However, there was not a single floor lamp with a dimmer switch available in that store, although they do make them here in Germany.  Stan and Judie actually had seen the perfect floor lamp in their hotel in Bavaria earlier in the week, but apparently Toom doesn’t carry it.

Anyway, we lugged the awkward-but-not-too-heavy box home, using 2 different buses. After a short break (well, OK, nap – hey, it was 80 degrees again and we’d been working hard!), we then set to work putting the lamp together.  It had bizarre tools included, some of which  I’d never seen before (see photo below).

We actually decided at one point that the black thing had been merely a protecting piece on something in the box, until we discovered it was a tool with which to screw on the nut that holds the little lamp’s globe in place. Who knew there was a tool for something like that. Trying to figure out the directions was bad enough, but the printing was miniscule, which meant that the numbers on the piece parts were almost indecipherable. Luckily there was a picture of what the lamp should look like at the end, although our final lamp was a bit more “artistic” at the end. Really, I think those straight poles on the bottom are supposed to be slightly slanted. At least Stan and I decided there was no actual way to get them stay completely straight.

But all we had to go on in terms of what it was supposed to look like was the blurry photo on the front of the box. There hadn’t been a floor model to look at in the store, just the box. Stan, Judie and I ultimately decided there’d been a reason there hadn’t been a  floor model of this lamp in the story – it was likely the staff hadn’t been able to figure it out.

It took over an hour’s worth of work, with 3 people working together.  Stan willingly undertook the herculean task of holding up  the heavy base steady as I labored to attach the support poles, which Judie heroically cradled the top lamp in her arms to make sure it didn’t come to a bad end as I tinkered with the washers and nuts on the base. However, as a result of our efforts, new light is now being shed in our living room.

Let there be light. Well, at least lamplight. 😉