Headboard Lights

Here's a project to take my mind off the utter fail that is the bathroom wall.  For a long time, I had a single lightbulb on a cord lighting my room... it would just sit there on the ground and that was how I lit my bedroom.  Ghetto ass shit.

I had hoped that one day I could make some kind of canopy above my bed by securing dowels to the wall and then draping lights/fabric over them.  But... I figured that was not very catproof.  Blah blah blah.  Long story short, I got the idea to twist some string lights around a metal headboard.  So I got the headboard (from Urban Outfitters, do-ho) and mounted it to the wall using the ol' screw/anchor combo.  This was a bit tricky because the "board" itself was kind of warped (so it wouldn't sit flush against the wall) and heavy (so it was hard to hold in place while marking drill-holes).  Turns out that the thing wobbled pretty badly until I added a washer to each screw to CLAMP THAT MOTHER DOWN.

So here we have the headboard fastened to the wall above my bed.  Originally the bed was in the center of the room, but I found that moving it to the corner left more space for accessing the closet, chasing the cats, and dancing around like a dork.  That's my excuse and I sure hope it stays valid, because I can't just move the headboard somewhere else all willy nilly (THAT SHIT TAKES EFFORT).

So next step was to find some string lights!  I wanted to get something "fairy"ish, i.e. small and thin and barely noticeable when they weren't turned on.  This meant no cheesy Christmas lights with the green string because I tried that once and it looked like poop.  Wanna see?

What is seen cannot be unseen.  I ended up buying some LEDs on amazon (searching for things with a lot of good customer reviews has really helped me to stop making derp purchases that I regret later).  I was pretty pleased with the lights, but somehow thought that "20 ft" would be a lot longer than it turned out to be.  I mean, it's 20 feet of effing lights!  That's like... 3 very tall humans wrapped around a metal headboard.  Long story short, the lights were not quite long enough to wrap around each square section of the headboard.  So, after messing with different wrap configurations, I got the lower half of the headboard to look okay and I brought in my TRUSTY PAPER STAR LANTERN to distract from the fuck-up that was not ordering enough lights.

Yay!  Not too bad, except for the fact that the LEDs and lantern don't really light up the room all the way.  It's good enough for now, though, and definitely better than a single lightbulb just lying on the ground.  Perhaps I will add another lamp in the other corner of the room in case more light is needed.  Here's another snapshot of the final result.

The cool thing about the headboard is that it has these little clips.  They worked well for holding the string lights.  I might put pictures or something else in the ones at the top that I didn't end up using.  Too bad I HAVE NO PICTURES AND THE CATS WOULD PROBABLY EAT THEM ANYWAY.  Pessimistic Emily signing off.