Bookshelf Lamp

I needed some place to store books in my living room. But I also needed a lamp to get some light in the dinning zone. After browsing a bunch of Pinterest posts, I decided to do it myself.

What I used :

• 3.6 x 3.8 x 238 cm fit timbers
• 30 x 30 x 1.7 cm fit boards
• 6 x 30 mm dowels
• a few screws
• wood glue
• black paint
• white paper roll
• staples

I used Sweet Home 3D to prepare the whole look and size.

There would be four 30cm height shelves. And the lamp zone would be 50cm of height.

The total height is about 180cm.

Cut all four timbers at the same height.

Then measure and mark the shelves position.

Finally, drill holes for the dowels.

Measure and cut the shelves.

Drill holes and insert the dowels.

I initially didn't want to glue things.

I wanted an invisible assembling and the whole stuff to be removable. The asymmetric dowels position was meant for this. But in the end, it was quite hard to assemble to whole stuff. And I'm not sure dismantling will be easy. Furthermore, space between timbers and boards are not easily solvable.

If I had to redo it, I would go for classical symmetric screwing.

Predrill the bottom board. Screw the board to the timbers.

Cut timbers, drill holes and put dowels.

Install the 4 sections in the vertical timbers.

This will be the bottom of the lamp section.

Cut some more timber bits. Assemble them together with dowels.

Screw them on top of the vertical timbers.

This builds the top section of the lamp.

Paint the whole structure in black.

I initially wanted to use Walnut dye. But it rendered weird on the board cuts that I used to test. So I finally used classical wood painting. I used 2 paint passes. Then I covered with beeswax.

I had an old lamp that was meant to be trashed. So I cut and kept the metal wires for this lamp.

Bits a board cuts were reused, glued and painted. The wires simply lay on them. They were gently bent so that they shall not fall when the lamp is moved.

The lamp is supposed to be inspired from Japanese lamps.

I cut 4 sheets of paper. The corners were cut. And the borders are folded.

Then the paper's pieces are stapled in the wood on the upper lamp zone.

The final rendering looks quite nice to me :)

There is no paper on the top and bottom sections of the lamp zone. That allows light to not be filtered towards the ceiling. And we plan to put some planting things on the top shelf.

The bottom of the lamp could be heavier. We have books on the lower shelves and the lamp lays in a corner of the room. So it should not fall.

The paper should have been fixed with a wood frame ; like in real Japanese lamp. The timbers were not really straight and I was a bit lazy. The paper is not tensed everywhere. But it's not really visible unless you stare are it.

All in all. This was fun!