Wardrobe Building - DIY Glass Lights!

As I wrote about earlier, this month has been filled with furniture, construction, and home improvement! While it didn't all go smoothly, it was definitely worth it. We now have a re-done, custom closet along with bedside tables and storage. To go along with our new bedside setup, we needed new lighting, so that's what I wanted to share with you today.

Now, once we had made it through just about everything, hanging the lights was the final fiasco. To start off, we bought two Ikea Hektar wall lights. For $15 a piece, they're actually really cute! However, for $15 a piece, they are also incredibly dim. The label said it will only accommodate a 7W CFL (40W tungsten) bulb, which isn't much light at all. (FYI all of Ikea's wall lights are this way). Good thing I plugged them in to check before we mounted them to the wall!

Not wanting to install built-in lighting (or hire an electrician), I started doing some serious shopping around for a plug-in option. Wall mounted ones are hard to find, but after some searching, bedside pendant lights seemed like a good option. I found some really cute ones on the web and on Etsy, but I was starting to get that feeling that said, I could make that for half the price! Sometimes this DIY lifestyle is killing me...

Lucky for me, in this case DIY pendant lighting was actually the easiest part of the project. I'll save you the research, the back-and-forth, and the photoshop mock-up and skip to the chase: all you have to do is buy a $7 glass bulb cover and screw it in to an $8 Ikea light kit (lightbulb and hanging hooks included).

You just screw off that little bottom part, sandwich the glass light cover in between, and screw back in the bottom part so it holds the glass in place.

Now, I promised not to sugar coat things, so you do have to go sit in Ikea traffic, make a trip to Home Depot, and hang the darn thing from the ceiling, but the actual assembly is so simple that I feel bad even calling it a DIY. Maybe I'll just refer to it as an AIY - assemble it yourself. Regardless, I couldn't believe I saved all this money on virtually the same product! There's some on Etsy that I was eyeing that looked even more similar, but I'm not going to tell you to knock off an Etsy product...

And here they are all installed in the room! Someday it would be great to heave actual hardwired lights, but for now I'm happy with my $30 hack.