Prologue
Recently I’ve determined that my home can use more shelf space. While investigating what was available at my local Lowes I found that they had some nice corner shelves on sale. I bought four without much plan and intended to find uses later. In addition, in the same day while cleaning I came across my IKEA Pendant lamp. I purchased this lamp some time ago with the intention of using it but, like my shelves, I didn’t have much plan for hanging the lamp it has sat in my garage for nearly four years as a result. There just really wasn’t anywhere in my home to hang it and I didn’t fully realize this until I got it home. My solution to both is use two wrongs to make a right and use one corner shelf for a mounting point for my hanging light turning it into more of a living room lamp rather then a ceiling fixture.
The Build
The floating shelf is not surprisingly hallow. This is actually a good thing. It meant running electrical wire would be easy. I just needed to create some access holes to work in and run wire to the lamp and to the socket.
To start I made sure that the shelf could hold the lamp far enough away from the wall for it to open completely and not touch. It could as long as I mounted it at the very edge. This would put a lot of stress on the shelf but after mounting one already I was confident it wouldn’t be an issue so long as I didn’t get crazy with what I put on the top ledge. In addition the shelf has an inner support beam in the center that the lamp mount is able to straddle so it ends up being very well supported.
Next I traced some areas of importance. I marked the center and marked the location of where two screw holes would need to be tapped to attach the lamps mounting plate. Later on I did some more tracing to mark where the wall plug would exit the shelf.
At this point I started drilling holes for the electrical wire. I needed one hole to run an electrical plug into the shelf and one hole to run wire for the lamp. The lamps wire needed to be rather large because the lamps mounting plate rotates around the screws to attach. I actually didn’t need to make the hole that large since I could have just screwed the plate in but I didn’t want to take out the screws too often. Once the screws were in they stayed in and were only ever tightened/loosened.
I made some guesses about the best place to put the wall outlet wire hole. In the end my measurements were off and I failed to place it correctly. I only got it correct on the third attempt and the previous holes needed repaired.
An additional wall outlet plug is used to get power into the shelf. Lowes carries some good solutions to this as well. The wiring is pretty simple. Most of the wiring is housed inside of the hollow compartment of the shelf. Some excess wire is also stored inside the lamps dome shaped cover. The rest of the mounting process is the same as mounting the lamp to a ceiling fixture.
The end result is a unique combination of shelf and hanging lamp. Sadly it creates some shadows but the pictures make it seem worse then it is. A solution I may explore would be to add a small outlet to the top of the shelf where I could plug in a small light in addition to any other items I hang.