Lightcorner

There was some light missing. On the balcony. On the inside of the living-room windows there is a small light chain hanging. Emitting a little bit of lot. Enough to get orientated, but not enough for being able to read a book.

So I needed to come up with a solution for this and make me a small light corner…

What I wanted was a small light source that uses only a bit of power. Not much screwing or mounting needed, but still fits in a corner.

There’s a roof on the balcony. I am not completely sure what it is made of, but I wanted to avoid drilling holes into it whenever possible. It would certainly have been the easiest way to support the weight of any constructions, but also might damage any levels of isolation or waterproof material behind it. Since I did not want to take on chance on that I decided to use the walls instead. They are covered with ordinary wood, so putting a screw into them should be very simple and straight forward.

Getting a hand on a wooden plate of minimum 64x64cm was simple. I got one slightly bigger so that I would have some additional material to work with.

Using a standard Jig saw I cut the wooden plate in half into the shape of a triangle that would fit into the corner.

At the local store I also found a set of LED lamps that could be build in into any surface, attached with a light sensor.

Drilling holes for them some part of the surface got loose and let some nasty scars in the wooden surface. This would be covered up with some white paint afterwards.

As far away from the corner I placed the hole for the light sensor. This needed a 12mm drill I had to buy in.

On the Internet I could not find any meaningful and easy to apply algorithm on how to place four dots in a triangle shaped surface with the optimum usage of the surface space. So I had to improvise and tried to spread them evenly.

With the first hole I made the mistake of choosing the outer diameter instead the inner one. That is so typically me. So I changed to the smaller one.

From the rest of the wooden plate I cut out front cover plate (actually two which I had to mount together) and added it in a 90 degree angle to the front side.

All small, minor mistakes then were covered up with the white paint on the outside.

The issue with the too big whole where I had used the drill with the outer diameter got fixed with some Sugru I usually have some at home and the white one would hold the LED in place.

Mounting the LED lamps and the light sensor in place I ended up basically having to use white Sugru for all Lamps to avoid them falling out.

The transformator got screwed on the inner side of the place, with some cable binders to hold the meters of cable in place.

Now on how to mount the wooden triangle.

The first idea was to just put some screws into the plate and screw it. The would make some screws visible (until covered with paint) and would give me just 15mm of wood to put the screw into it. Also removing the triangle would make a screwdriver necessary.

The second idea were some magnet locks on the inside of the wall. Those would align with plates on the inside of the triangle. A couple of them should hold the whole thing in place.

The only pack I was able to get were some labeled as 2 kg locks - so I bought some of them. Turned out that they were almost cable to keep the triangle in place (considering the extra weight from the electric installation).

At the end I was lucky. The thickness of the triangle plate on top of the wood in the corner aligns nicely with some ribs in the wall. I used them the put in some small wood pieces to keep the triangle in place.

It surely is not as pretty as it would be if it could be hold only magnetic, but good enough.

Trough a small whole in the corner I took down the power cable to the power socket.

Everything being setup up, the lights comes on when it’s getting dark and now there is enough light to read book and to enjoy even the late evenings.