While I continued sanding and sealing the final boards for the ceiling, Eli jumped on working on our homemade light fixtures (astute folks will have noted a sneak peak prototype in the final picture on my last blog post).  After seeing some really cool custom light designs on the internet, Eli and I worked out how we might make similar ones ourselves (okay, I might have had to do a little convincing on this… Me: “Check out these awesome light designs!”  Eli: “Um, we’re going to make our own light fixtures, too?”). 🙂

We decided wooden box style lights for the five that will be our main lighting in our living room would look striking, and log lights for our bedroom loft – rad!

As I mentioned, Eli had already been tinkering around with a couple iterations of a prototype for the box lights.  But, after fortuitously spotting a discarded pine branch along the side of the road that Eli snatched up while I was changing shoes (I didn’t even see him grab it), he was pumped to get to work on the log lights.

Eli had thought the log lights would take more head-scratching and tinkering than the box lights, but they just came together really well, and he ended up being able to knock them out pretty quickly.

He cut the log up into a couple chunks, hollowed out each log chunk, trimmed the pieces to the size we wanted, then used a jig and our router to carve out a shallow rectangle in the back where we’d attach an electrical wall plate for mounting to the electrical box.

Hollowing out log

Trimming log to size

Jig to route out indentation for wall plate

We had to do some searching around for light bulbs that would fit and not get too hot in the narrow hollow inside the log, but would still be bright enough to provide some light.  Thank goodness for LED technology!  Once Eli got the bulb socket, wiring, and wall plate in place, we were ready for install.

Wired up with electrical box plate installed

Light bulb

Log light fixtures ready for placement

Log light fixtures installed

Log light fixtures installed

Holy crap, they look amazing!!  Even better than I was imagining.

These log lights will be our reading lights at the head of our bedroom.  Although the LED bulbs are surprisingly bright for their size, the log lights still won’t light the entire bedroom.  We decided we’ll need to probably install a string of LED strip lights along the ceiling ridge for added light.  Too bad we didn’t realize that earlier to be able to direct wire them, but so it goes.  So much of this tiny house build is uncharted territory!