Homemade Lights for the Playhouse

I knew I wanted something different for the lighting in the playhouse.  I quickly decided to create my own lighting out of leftover cans from large cans of tomatoes.  

At first I thought about creating something with a sailing theme but my artwork consistently moved too far into complicated territory and I wanted these lights to be simpler.  I especially didn't want the building of these light fixtures to be any more difficult than necessary because I was on a tight schedule at this point to get the whole playhouse project finished.

I decided to create star patterns...  one recognizable group of stars for each light.  I chose The Big Dipper, The Little Dipper and Cepheus mostly because these star patterns would be easily recognizable and fairly easy to drill into these old cans.  

I set my drill press on the outdoor kitchen countertop so I could work on this project during a rainy day then I went back to work on some of my many outdoor projects including renovating the playhouse.  As I worked on these other projects, I kept the lighting project in my thoughts since I still had a few details to work out like how I was going to mount them on the wall, how and where I was going to turn them on and off, what color I would paint them, etc.  

On the next rainy day, I started working on the lighting.  I broke a drill bit or two but drilling all these holes of various sizes went surprisingly quickly once I figured out a decent technique to keep the drill bit from walking on the curved surface of the cans.  One section of one pattern turned out slightly sloppy because the drill bit kept walking on me.  

After drilling all the holes, I then spray painted the cans an oiled bronze color.  Painting required a few days because I applied three coats...  first one primer and then two top coats, one per day.  

Then I needed to mount the light sockets in the cans.  I had already purchased three candelabra base sockets just for this project.  Squeezing my hands into these cans was a very tight fit but I managed to mount the light sockets.  I needed some tiny modeling bolts, nuts and washers since the mounting holes were so small.  

Somewhere along the line, I decided to mount these cans on a U-bracket from a shelf system that I had lying around.  I cut the U-brackets to the appropriate length and then painted these the same oiled bronze as I used on the cans.  

When the playhouse was ready for installing the lighting fixtures, I mounted them and then wired them.  I wanted to test them so I excitedly pulled out some candelabra base light bulbs so I could see how these homemade light fixtures look.  Unfortunately, I couldn't screw the candelabra base bulbs into these sockets!  I went back to my invoice for the sockets and found that I had ordered "mini-candelabra" base sockets which are 1mm smaller than the standard candelabra base.  Now I needed to find the correct bulbs and have them delivered within a few days or there would be no working lights in the playhouse for our big reveal.  Fortunately, the correct bulbs arrived within a few short days.  

While I was waiting for the smaller light bulbs to arrive, I had some time to finished up all the small details in the playhouse starting with covering all the wiring with rustic wood trim.  I also had to make a little routed shelf for chalk and erasers for the blackboard. 

I think the lighting fixtures came out very well and are the perfect size for this little playhouse.