In these days of a questionable economy, we are trying to be very frugal with our home decorating decisions. One way to update your home is to update your lampshades. Lampshades provide a low-cost alternative to purchasing completely new lamps and keep something usable from a landfill. See more photos below.

If you've ever purchased lampshades before you know they can sometimes be cost prohibative themselves, and if you live anywhere near an Ikea, you probably dreamed about using a stylish, low-cost Ikea lampshade on your old lamps. You probably also know that Ikea lampshades are made to function with the rest of the Ikea lighting products. Good for Ikea, but bad for non-Ikea lamp owners.

We own 2 brushed stainless steel desk lamps we've had about 5 years. We love the simple, basic lamp base, but had grown tired of the bruushed stainless steel shades and wanted a change. We had wanted to incorporate orange into our work area and decided this was the perfect opportunity. We decided on the Ikea 7" Skimra lampshade in orange . It's taller cylindrical shape was also a nice modern shape we liked for our purpose. The best part was the $7 price tag. We knew our desktop would completely begin to change for a mere $14.

The simple solution to retro-fitting our lamp with a new Ikea lampshade was to alter the small plastic clip included with the lampshade. Verify your lampshades have this prior to leaving Ikea; I noticed some lampshades were missing this important piece.

To protect our hands from cuts, we wore thick contractors gloves prior to handling the knife needed to modify the part. We took our time a slowly enlarged the inside opening of the lampshade clip until it fit onto our old lamp. Each lamp shade took approximately 15 minutes because we believe in safety.

?