Never one to turn down a freebie, let alone 13 freebies, when my art director Matt texted me to say his garage was full of these…

and did I want them, the answer was an emphatic “Yes, please!”

“These” being vintage wooden index card drawers. Used as tool storage and then abandoned by the previous owner of Matt’s house, Matt lugged 13 of them in for me. What a dude.

I had been looking for a project to do with Big Dave – one of our amazing friends who is a fully qualified electrician and handyman extraordinaire – so I started to think of how to turn these into some form of bedside light.
Big Dave had turned me on to Historic Lighting, a division of über-cool company Urban Cottage Industries.

These guys sell a niche pocket of cool goods, from vintage style lighting sundries to personalised embossed Moleskine notebooks. Very very cool.
I quickly ordered some lighting flex in bright blue.

Then, I found these metal cages for light bulbs and thought the three (drawer, flex, and cage) would come together nicely.

And so they did, like so…

A simple hole drilled through one end, Big Dave working his wiring magic, and a d-ring added to the back and B and I have new, bespoke bedside beauties that splay a cool light-show when on, and cast the perfect amount of bedside reading light. Now I am hooked on the idea of making lighting…

(if anyone needs the services of an amazing electrician, give me a shout and I will pass on Big Dave’s details – he rocks!)

Tags: custom lighting, diy bedside light, vintage index card drawer

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 30th, 2013 at 6:36 am and is filed under love'it&covet, update&decorate. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.