The cord set comes with an open eye hook, but it didn’t work in our situation because there was no stud in the ceiling where we wanted to hang the light. We ended up buying a hanging plant hook kit. We had to modify the hook slightly because the plastic wire hanger that came with the Hemma was too small to fit over the end of the planter hook.

To fix this, I simply cut the end off of the hook with a small hacksaw. The metal was very soft and this took only seconds.  If you don’t have a hacksaw, you could possibly use heavy duty wire cutters to cut the end off.

These hanging kits are designed to hold hanging planters which are pretty heavy and come with the parts to install on either a stud or directly into drywall.  The drywall anchor is a spring toggle bolt, which is capable of hanging a lot of weight. This is a bit overkill for this project, but it doesn’t hurt. For other projects, you may want to check out which kind of drywall anchor would be right for you. To install this toggle bolt, I used a half-inch spade drill bit to drill a hole in the ceiling large enough to accept the toggle bolt when it is folded.

Once the hole has been drilled, simply insert the toggle bolt and screw the hook until it is tight against the ceiling.

We planned to power the light using a power socket under the kitchen cabinets by the sink but we didn’t want the plug just hanging down from the ceiling for two reasons; 1) Because it is unsightly and 2) because the Hemma wire was several feet too long. What we decided to do was to run the wire inside our cabinets and leave the extra wire on top of the cabinet. To do this, we used a larger drill bit to drill a hole bottom shelf and the top of the cabinets as close to the back corner as possible.

A 1-inch spade drill bit which was just wide enough to handle the plug.

We threaded the wire through the holes and tied a knot just before the bottom hole leaving enough on the other side to reach the plug under the cabinets. This knot should prevent any extra wire from coming through the hole.

To keep the wire out of the way and tidy inside the cabinet, we used small nails to tack it to the back side of the cabinet facing. This also help rout the wire neatly around the inner shelves.

We got a shade from a local Habitat for Humanity ReStore for $2.00. These stores are great because they have a wide variety of random construction pieces and furniture for great prices and the money goes to help Habitat for Humanity. The particular share we got was a bit too big to fit on the screw part of the hemma, so I filed down some of the plastic on the hemma’s light socket to make some room. I was only able to thread a couple of threads on the socket with the screw piece, but that was plenty to hold the shade.

All in all, the IKEA Hemma proved to be a great solution for us. There are tons of really great examples out there using it as well. It allows you to be creative and still coming up with a professional look.  If you have used the Hemma for a DIY lighting project, we’d love to see what you did! Leave us a comment with info and a link.

This is the first part in a two part series about how to design, build, and finish a simple woodworking project.  This part focuses on the design and build of the project.

Jessica and I tend to collect a lot of books.   I mean a LOT of books.  When one of those cheap 7ft tall particle board bookcases we had finally bit the dust, and fell on me, I decided we would only get solid wood bookcases from now on.  I also decided that it was probably best that the bookcase we get to replace the broken one be rather short, something that would fit just under the window in our living room. With the cost of solid wood bookcases being pretty high and nothing available suiting our needs exactly, I decided we should design and build one ourselves. Rather than trying to fit a new bookcase into our living room, why not design one that already fits?

This project was a practice in two arts.  Firstly, it was an excuse to teach myself how to use Google Sketchup, and secondly I wanted to get more experience with woodworking.  Most of the earlier projects I did with wood were literally laughed at (and many with good reason), so I had plenty of room to grow.

The first step in this whole process was to design something to build. I researched a lot on the internet for the perfect bookcase style. I didn’t find anything that I could easily build with the tools I had laying around.  Being in a small apartment without a garage, it is hard to store table saws and the like.  The tools I have are power hand tools, a circular saw, a power sander, an electric drill, and other simple things like that.

I finally decided on what I would build.  I took elements from many book cases I saw online and started drawing up my idea in Sketchup.  The easiest way to do this, I’ve found, is to simply create a particular piece of wood, then make that piece a “component.”  Then you can treat the whole thing as a single object.  I will go into more depth about Google Sketchup and even the Sketchup physics engine in other posts, feel free to check them out.

After lots of playing around, and learning the basics of Sketchup, I ended up with this:

Bookshelf Front in Sketchup

Everything in the design could easily be bought from any lumber yard or hardware store. It consisted of 1”x2”s, 2”x12”s, and 1”x4”s.  Sadly, these measurements are the wet weight measurements, before the wood is fully dried.  When dried, the wood actually shrinks a good bit.  Here’s a chart that may help you find the actual sizes of dimensional lumber.  I already knew this fact; however for some reason I completely ignored it when designing.  So back to the drawing board I went.

I planned on making this out of Red Oak (which is a hardwood).  The dimensions of hardwood lumber are a little different, but since I’m cutting by hand, the difference of 1/16^th of an inch between the dimensions won’t matter.   I redrew the design to account for the different wood sizes.  This wasn’t very hard as I had made all the wood pieces components, and copied and pasted things that were the same size.  In Sketchup, editing one of a group of the same components changes all other components automatically.  For instance if I changed the height of one side, the other side will change automatically.  This speeds up corrections somewhat. There is also an option to make a particular component unique, so changes made to it only apply to that particular part.

Once I had the design, I had to figure out a way of connecting the parts.  Of course I would use screws and glue, but how would I connect everything together without showing the screw holes?  I stumbled on a neat joinery method called “pocket screws”.  Pocket screws use a jig to drill a hole diagonally through the end of one piece of wood, and into another.  This can completely hide the screw while still making a very strong connection.

How Pocket Holes Work

With all the wood dimensions I needed, I was off to the local super-hardware center.  At many super-hardware centers, they offer boards by the foot.  They’ll even cut it to length for you.  So I looked for the straightest, cleanest Red Oak boards I could find (there weren’t many).  Finally deciding on certain boards, I asked for help from one of the store associates who ran the saw. Now, anyone with common sense knows that when you use a saw blade to cut a piece of wood, you are actually removing a strip of wood the thickness of the saw blade.  Apparently, this is not in the training video for this particular super-hardware store as the associate proceeded to cut my parts “through the center of the measurement mark.”  Worse than that, he was inconsistent with it.  Sometimes he would cut the center of the measurement mark, and sometimes he would cut it a bit short, and sometimes a bit long.  All of this threw my measurements off again.

I grabbed a pocket hole jig kit and wood glue on my way out of the store after gathering all my poorly cut lumber.  The approximate price breakdown is:

• Lumber = $160
• Tools and Glue  = $30

It was a fairly expensive project, but completely worth it.  Overall, this project still cost less than buying a brand new solid wood under-window bookcase, especially if it were custom built.  Not to mention all the fun that was had and all the stuff we learned while building it.

Finally having all the parts, I knew I’d have to cut most of the boards smaller again to resize them all.  I redrew the design yet again in Sketchup to make sure it would all work out.  After this, Jessica and I got to work.  We cut and rough-sanded all of the parts.  Sanding took forever as Red Oak is a very hard wood.  It was December of 2008, and we were working outside on the back deck, so instead of taking time to take loads of detailed pictures of the process and freezing to death, we hurriedly put it together exactly as the Sketchup file shows.

The Final Sketchup file can be downloaded from the Google 3d Warehouse. Feel free to edit it and repost it (as long as you give us inspiration credit . )

Since it was winter, we couldn’t stain the bookshelf as it was way too cold outside for the stain to set.  The stain cannot be applied below 65°.  Part 2 of this article goes through the process (with more pictures) and the results of staining.