Our New Color-Changing Steampunk Shelving!

Several months ago I posted this little teaser over on the Epbot FB page:

Those wooden rings were the beginning of John's final(?) big furniture project for the steampunk room.

From there he added shelves:

Then a stand:

(Anyone else seeing Spaceship Earth? Because I SWEAR that was not intentional. Ha!)

Next he stained the wood and added steel trim to the shelf edges:

And finally - the tricky part - wrapped the whole outer edge in aluminum:

Pretty sweet, right? I was inspired by Restoration Hardware's Aviator line:

Here's the pair all set up in the room:

 

Originally I wanted the shelves to have industrial fan blades behind them (ergo John's crack about the smoke effects) so they'd look more like airship propellers. Reality and a lack of space intervened on that count, but in the end I got something even cooler:

Embedded. Color-changing. LEDs.

BEHOLD!

The flash feature would be a bit crazy-making, of course, so we leave them at one color. There's a wireless remote with all the color choices, so it's easy to change. My favorite is the teal, since it matches our side chairs, but it's fun to mix it up.

Or, if we don't want any color, I can set the LEDs to orange and they'll match the rest of the light in the room:

You can also control the brightness, which we keep at the lowest setting. I often leave these on while we're watching TV, so I don't want them to be too distracting.

The LED strips are glued to the underside top of all three shelves, which gives them a perfect all-over glow. The strips we used were dirt cheap - only around $20 with the power supply and remote for each unit - but soldering the tiny wires was crazy hard, and our first set promptly broke the second John finished it, which I hear is common. :/

Our second set of LEDs worked, though, and - knock on wood - has been working just fine for the last month. If you're willing to take the gamble, here's the set we bought over on Amazon.

Those pics up there have the overhead light on, but at night I love having just the Edison lights and these on, which looks more like this:

It's darker and cozier, and very warm with the Edison bulbs' glow. (Not easy to capture with my camera, which makes everything a lot brighter. Sorry 'bout that.)

Purple and fuchsia do weird things on film; they're not really this insane looking:

Although red IS this hellish. Ha!

Now a look at the stuff ON the shelves:

I'm planning to replace that scale with our new Harry Potter Omnoculars, once we build a stand for it.

Over on the other side, the star is my Nixie clock:

Which of course photographs terribly, but looks oh-so-cool at night:

And one more overview shot:

So there you have it: our finally completed main wall of the steampunk room!

Hope you guys liked it! And of course you'll be getting another tour come December, once we deck this bad boy out for Christmas. Can. Not. WAIT.