Drawer Lights four our wardrobe drawers
After I have built our new wardrobe for the master bedroom, I always planned on adding light to the drawers I have installed. Today the time has finally come to execute this project.
I always had some ideas on how to install the lights, but my first two plans were way to complicated. So the version I now built is the third iteration. I initially wanted to have the switch at the back of the drawer and inbuilt into the wardrobe. However, this would have meant I needed a complicated structure behind each drawer to mount the switch. My actual solution did not hide the drawer but was a lot simpler to build and install. It allowed me to build the light for each drawer entirely in my shop, which made it a lot easier for me.
Another goal I had, was to not directly mount anything to the drawers and thereby destroy the drawers. The solution: Cut a rabbet into the wood with the same width as the drawer side thus allowing the light to slide on top of the drawer, without the need for any screws.
As a light source, I used a LED strip. These do not give a beautiful light, and for the next time I would buy strips with warm white light instead of cold white, but it works and fulfills the task of allowing me to find my things in the drawer without the need of the room light.
It is so beautiful to have light in this drawers; I could have been a bit faster on this project if I would have planed a bit better ahead of time. I initially planned to make 10 lights for all the drawers. However, mid-project I realized that I do not need light in every drawer. So, in the end, I only finished 6 lights.
We now lived with this project for some time already, and I’m pleased how it turned out. I needed to shim the buttons on some drawers a bit to get the light to turn off reliably.