Check your lampshades

I have a good friend who owns a beautiful log cabin in a small town outside Fort Worth (not yee-haw, by any means...think elegant rustic, with the emphasis on elegant). He also owns a very contemporary condo in Dallas. Both were professionally decorated, with a lot of input from him. Suffice it to say he has a good eye for decor.

He called me one night to tell me a great story about a floor lamp he had bought a couple of weeks earlier and almost returned. He and his partner loved it in the store, but when they got it to the condo, something just wasn't right about it. It didn't look as tall as it had looked in the store. It had an awkwardness they hadn't noticed before. They walked around it for two weeks, looking at it from every possible angle, and finally decided they simply didn't like it.

When they got it back to the store, my friend couldn't find his receipt. The helpful salesperson offered to look it up the sale on the computer. While she was doing that, his partner came up and said, "I found the floor model of the lamp we liked. That isn't the same lamp." After receiving a refund, they showed the salesperson the model on the floor that they liked, and how she handled the explanation without laughing can only be a testament to her good training. They had bought the right lamp. They had just put the lampshade on upside down. (The lamp now resides in their bedroom and is beautiful...as well as the perfect height!)

I can't tell you what a good laugh I've had at their expense. Until now, that is. I was looking through our website and found a photo that didn't look right to me. The lampshade was bigger at the top than it was at the bottom. Why? You guessed it...upside down. Uh...it could happen to anybody, right?

What it's NOT supposed to look like