The Best Way to Recycle Liquor Bottles

I'm not an electrician. That is something I feel I should let you know from the start. I enjoy making bottle lamps and have gotten plenty of compliments for them. Because I am not an electrician, I will not be giving you instructions on how to make your own bottle lamps. This is the story of a grown man's love of making bottle lamps.

I made my first bottle lamp back in 2015. One day, while looking for my guitar in my son's room, I found an empty bottle of UV Vodka in his closet!

After I scolded and grounded my son, I was going to throw the bottle away when a thought entered my mind: "This would make a pretty cool lamp!" I'm not sure why that thought entered my mind; like I said earlier, I'm not an electrician. In fact, the closet thing to electrical work I had done prior to my lamp making was resetting a breaker in my circuit box!

I didn't throw the bottle away that day but I also didn't make a bottle lamp that day. I kept the bottle for weeks, maybe even months, trying to figure out how to make a lamp out of this bottle. One day, I Googled "How to drill a hole in glass" and turned the empty vodka bottle into a lamp.

I gave my son the lamp. Yeah, I know...and you're right. It was wrong of me to scold my son for having the vodka bottle in his room and then end up turning it into a lamp for him, but this isn't a story about good parenting, it's a story about how I started making bottle lamps.

One day when my son's mom came to pick him up, he showed her the lamp I made. His mother couldn't believe that I made the lamp myself. She told me I should make more and sell them. I told her I didn't think I could make any real money from it. She told me should would pay $50 for a bottle lamp like the one I made. I asked her if she wanted to buy the bottle lamp I made for my son. She, of course, said, "No".

A few weeks later, my son's mother came to see my son again (yes, he lived with me) and this time brought a bunch of empty liquor bottles she got from the restaurant she worked at and gave them to me to make more bottle lamps. She said she would bring me more bottles when she could. The only thing she asked in return was for me to make her a lamp out of a Crown Royal bottle that she brought me. So, I, of course, made her a Crown Royal bottle lamp.

After the Crown Royal lamp, I made a few Jack Daniel's lamps, a Marilyn Merlot lamp (which I consider my favorite and sold for $60), and more. I posted them on Facebook and friends, family, and co-workers asked me to make bottle lamps for them.

Then, one day a friend of mine reached out to me and asked if I could make a New England Patriots bottle lamp. She wanted to give it to her husband for his birthday. I told her I would try. I really wasn't sure how I could make that bottle lamp for her until one day, while at the local Goodwill I found a clear flip top glass bottle. As soon as I saw that bottle, I thought, "I could find some Patriots stickers and adhere them to this bottle." I decided to go look for some stickers at the local Dollar Tree first (so as to keep my overhead low). I didn't find any Patriots stickers there but I did find some battery powered mini-lights for only $1 and thought, "These will be perfect for some bottle lamps!" But then a thought occurred to me: "How will I attach the mini-lights to the bottle?" Glue wouldn't work, because it would make changing the batteries difficult. Tape wouldn't work because it wouldn't be sturdy enough to last. Then, I remembered I had seen adhesive velcro strips at this Dollar Tree when I bought the decorative pebbles for the Crown Royal lamp! I bought the mini-lights, velcro strips and found Patriot stickers at a sports collectible store and made a Patriots bottle lamp for my friend's husband.

That's how an adult man without electrician's knowledge or experience began making bottle lamps.