GoKawiilSomehow, I spent 8 months of my free time designing and building a wall lamp from scratch. I didn’t have prior experience in woodworking or LED strips. Read on for how it came to be (and how it turned out).
Ambitions
The lamp topic actually started with the living room.
Having moved recently, I still had a gap to fill on the wall. Indirect lighting is the best kind of lighting (this needs no debate), so why not build a wall lamp that illuminates the whole living room? And while switched off, it’s an art piece? Consisting of lasercut Plexiglas panels that are backlit by LED strips, with support for animations? With wood paneling on the sides to make it look more classy?
Daydreaming of what this elusive piece of furniture could look like, I drew some mock-ups. I then came to my senses and realized:
I had never worked with LED strips before, I had no clue how to mount the Plexiglas panels, I had no idea how to design the lamp so it could be mounted on the wall, and I had zero experience in woodworking.
I estimated that starting and finishing this project would take me 2 years, with a 99% chance of it never being finished. So I just hung paintings instead:
After congratulating myself for being such a mature decision-maker, I stepped into the rabbit hole of DIY lamps anyway, by building a simpler wall lamp for the bedroom. The idea would be to build a lamp as an art study, collecting enough experience to have a realistic chance of building that elusive lamp in the future.
So back to daydreaming, the best phase of any DIY project.
Mock-Ups
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