Thrift Store Candle Sconces Turned Into Shelves

 Turn old thrifted candle sconces into beautiful wall shelves!

You can watch the full tutorial here: https://youtu.be/UJgfaQEZ1Uw

Candle wall sconces are abundant at my local thrift store so I wanted to find a way to repurpose these in a uniquely beautiful and useful way!

I started by giving them both a nice cleaning and then freshened them up with two coats of white chalk paint.

Once they were dry, I unscrewed the candle cup to remove them. I’ll put those in my craft stash to use on another project one day. For this project, you won’t need the candle cups.

I used a fine grit sanding block to scuff up the edges around the sconce to give it some light distressing.

I then grabbed one of my favorite Vintage Damask stencils from Amazon (you can find it here: https://amzn.to/43n9R6x)

I also grabbed some of my Spackling from Dollar Tree, added a few tiny drops of water into the Spackling to make a paste consistency, then mixed it well.

I then used some painters tape to tape down my stencil to the wall sconce so it wouldn’t move around. Then I used a Dollar Tree cricut spatula (any small spatula will work) and spread my Spackling over top of my stencil. The key is to completely cover the stencil so that you will get a beautiful raised textured design.

As you can see in the photo above, once I removed the stencil, I had this pretty textured damask design left behind!

If you have any Spackling that went over the edge, you can just scrape it right off.

My sconce was a little taller than my stencil so I just lined it up and repeated the process.

To repurpose my wall sconces, I decided I wanted to make shelves with them, so I found these thick wood plaques at Dollar Tree (you can find similar ones at craft stores as well). I didn’t want my shelves to be exactly alike so I chose 2 different shapes for mine.

I used a wet paint brush and some brown acrylic paint to stain my plaques then wiped away any excess with a paper towel.

I wanted to bring out those beautiful raised details so I went over them very gently with some European Gold rub n buff once the Spackling had completely dried. 

Then all I had left to do was add my shelves. I used Gorilla wood glue to attach the shelves to the sconces and as you can see below, I attached them upside down to follow the scalloped shape of the sconce.

I made sure to seal everything with 3 light coats of Aileen’s acrylic sealer to finish my sconce shelves off.