wrote:
wrote:
Hi

More about my basement level ...

Spent an afternoon at John Lewis looking at pendant lighting for the
basement bedroom. Nice stuff but alot of it hangs down 55 cms or more.
My ceiling's very low - 230 cm! The room is 5m x 4m and the light is
right in the middle of the room, just at the end of the bed.

Does anyone know of any guidelines or tips on how to choose a pendant
in this sort of situation? Or is the sort of thing like this

http://www.johnlewis.com/Electrical/...4/Product.aspx

totally the wrong way to go anyway in a low ceiling situation?

Lights pointing upwards? Downwards? My favourite has a minimum drop of
40 cms but this seems far too low but I don't know anything about this
stuff. Is it too low? I'm totally design blind! I'm just trying to make
the place look sensible.

Cheers

Emma


Did you get your door sorted out?

Door is on hold. It's all spec'd out though and ready to order!

I've never heard almost 8' described as low before. 6', yes.

Sorry, I forgot to add that it's low at 230cm compared to the other
floor which is 320cm. It just feels a lot lower down in the basement.

Leola will cause glare and uneven illumination. Most centre fittings in
a 4x5m room would give uneven ilumination. In a room that size I'd go
for a handful of smaller fittings around he periphery. If you arent
interested in wiring for those, either use plugins or else accept that
youre not going to get decent even illumination and fit whatever looks
nice in the middle. Lights pointing up and outwards are going to give
you the best light spread, down pointers will give worse lightspread
and lower energy efficiency.

In another thread I mentioned about my dodgy refurbishers. They spent
two weeks languishing doing a bedroom and I had to get rid of them.
They were supposed to be replacing underneath a staircase next and
after they turned up late every day, kept nipping off to do other jobs,
drinking and smoking gear on the job I couldn't face letting them
continue, what with hairs on the woodwork, carpet not taken up
properly, underneath a radiator painted two different colours, wall
paint on skirting and ceiling etc etc. All a bit sad really. I did one
bedroom myself last year and the finishing was better and that was my
first time. Waste of money. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that the
bedroom is sort of painted so I don't think I'm going to channelling
any holes in the wall in the near term!

Thanks for the advice about the main light.

Actually, I have some 'boxing in' on one side of the room where the gas
and water pipes travel so maybe I could put some lights on that. The
fusebox is in the room too so it must be possible :-)

Stay well away from mains halogens.

Also leola has an excessive number of lamps. To nmake that sensible
you'd have to fit lots of very low power lamps, giving frequent dead
bulbs, poor efficiency and elevated bills.

If youre daring you could fit something like metal guttering suspended
below the ceiling, running down the room, and put cfls in it at regular
intervals. Would give much better illumination than any central
fitting, but trying to make the fitting look good would be a fair
challenge. Perhaps cover it in velvet. I dunno!

Another push the boat out option is simply a central light with very
long arms. You could use chromed plumbing pipe giving 4 arms, perhaps
each 4 ft long, each running level 1' below the ceiling, with an
uplight on the end of each arm, globes or if youre more daring, maybe
cubes.

Fancy plumbing your own for something much better than you could buy?

This last idea sounds really good fun and I have a friend who could
help me knock it up I reckon. I'm not sure how you'd support four, four
foot arms though! I've seen those cubes and so on; I quite fancied this
on the walls at one point

http://www.johnlewis.com/Electrical/...8/Product.aspx

but went for one like this instead:

http://www.thelightingsuperstore.co....ar_2lt_C-O.jpg

But how do you get hold of the parts for making your own light
fixtures? Any suppliers you know of cubes or opaque glass end or the
multitude of other bits needed?! Or am I going to have to go into
lighting jobs unscrewing various bits from their displays :-)

Cheers

Emma