So, I’ve spent the day working on the lighting in the kitchen (so far). It’s been a surprisingly pleasant experience, although there’s a few bits I’m not entirely happy with. You can see some of the connector blocks because I didn’t sink them down into the body of the wood far enough. This is basically a mixture of lack of patience and not bringing my chisel up to the house which would have been ‘the right tool’.
I didn’t bring the chisel because I forgot that I’d need to sink the blocks down into the wood and thought that given how soft the driftwood is I’d be able to get away with using stanley blades to hide the wires. This was, broadly speaking, true. But I didn’t quite get as much depth as I should have for the connector blocks, and thought they’d not be visible from underneath. They’re almost not. Mainly I stopped cutting them in because it was f’ing hot in the kitchen that day, the sun being very warm, and I reached a point of thinking I wanted to stop being quite so warm. But from the angle where you walk into the kitchen you can just see them. This is upsetting, but not terribly.
Because essentially I’m pretty happy with them.
Here, for your viewing pleasure is the complete timelapse assembly of the lights. You can see all the bodges, hacks and lazyness that went in to them. And then… PHOTOS!
And here are the finished lights…
There are some annoying problems though. Well, two. The bulb holders were, given the overpricedness of chrome BC lamp holders, nasty. Nasty nasty. I mean, they look nice on the outside, but the screws are ill fitting, the threads aren’t great and, it turns out, the 1/2″ thread at the top isn’t right on two of them. After a great deal of fiddling I managed to get four of them to accept the reducer (that takes it from 1/2″ to 10mm for the cable clamp, because I couldn’t see any 1/2″ cable clamps… The world is an odd place.
They look like this:
[Please excuse the filthy bulb, it came out of the junk / emergency bulb collection that lives under our stairs]
But two of them look like this… because no matter what I did the threads were so badly mated that it would cross-thread part way through screwing it together.
Which is annoying. But hey. It’s not that’s noticeable when you’re in the room.
Actually, this isn’t the final iteration of the lighting design – because the centre bulbs are meant to be replaced with decorative filament incandescent bulbs and the non-energy savers with energy savers. I may show you a final shot of the lights fully equipped with all the right bulbs if I’m very nice.
If I ever do it again I shall hide the incoming wire in one of the poles, and do a better job of hiding the wire running along the top, because I do love the way it looks like the wire is ‘just hanging there’ with bulbs on each end, at least, when you’re standing in the right place.
But now I’m going to go shower (because it’s after 1pm and I’ve finished making holes in the ceiling) and then I’m going to get some food.
