When researching running a blog site and SEO, the first trick is to post a few times a week. Well I’ve certainly failed on that front! It’s hard to stay on top of it when there’s still a fair amount to do in the house! Also I’m finding it terribly slow and disengaging to use WordPress and image uploads so have some learning to do on how to optimise this.
So I’ve had this vision of automatic sensor based lighting around the house since buying it back in 2016. The problem is that fancy lighting systems falls to the very bottom of the pile of priorities. Fortunately we’ve saved a fair amount of money by not going abroad this year and being a recluse during lockdown!
Here is the plan of our bookshelves and the inbuilt lighting.
Fitted shelves
We love using Ikea to furnish our house. Bringing contemporary design to the masses at more than reasonable prices! The only downside is that I have a pet hate for unnecessary gaps with furniture and always prefer to ‘flushify’ things if possible. This meant building bespoke shelves for the alcove in our dining room.
I will make a few posts around how I built these, such as how I made the frame. This post is showing my plan for going ahead!
Routed slots for LED casing
Each bottom panel of the shelf has a routed slot. I notice online a lot of people use bare LEDs around their rooms which I think looks too harsh and could do with diffusing. Prior to finding the right LEDs or even the controllers, I knew I’d definitely be using some sort of casing so I did my routing according to these cases.
Cable channeling
There’s no point having a fancy shelving setup if there’s cables trawling everywhere. I planned for the thickness of these shelves to account for this and have the cables hidden within these shelves. The bottom panel will have a drilled hole to feed the LEDs, then I’ll channel the cables to the same corner and have them in a case going down to the bottom.
Next steps
Truth be told I am actually improvising this as I’m going along. There are already a number of things I’d do differently but I have this problem of researching things to the nth degree and then getting nothing done. Because of this I’ve started a job which I think I can do but not sure on the path I’ll take! Some things I’ll mention later would be how to secure the shelves for heavier items, positioning of the LED strips and how to remove excess unnecessary weight on the shelves themselves.
I didn’t go to this level of winging it when it came to making fitted wardrobes for the bedroom!
- The shelves need painting. I’m trying to match the Ikea cabinet below so investigating colour matching their ‘black brown’ wood colour
- LEDs! I think i’ll be settling on Gledopto. This means sourcing a few things from Aliexpress. FYI doing this via Philips Hue would cost 10 x more
- Smart is the keyword, this is all part of a greater plan to have these work automatically with sensors around the house so that they will effectively never need to be manually controlled.
- Filler for the gaps, being built in 1919, none of the walls are straight really.
- I’m concerned even with filler and paint, the front will be obvious that it’s three different bits of wood. I may look into putting a front wooden fascia on each of the shelves for a smoother finish.
- Because of all this reading into lighting and such, I’ve really slacked on reading books recently (compared to the start of lockdown). So I hope this is an investment in my future!