Illuminating ideas at the bar.

For a while now i've had a bar in the corner of my living-room, and its awesome! except for one problem. When you stand at the bar, you're directly between the light in the center of the room, and the drinks, so you cant really see anything while pouring.

So here's the bar:

Its still not 100% finished, but i've been waiting for a solution to the light problem to do it. Or to move house. 

The other problem is the amount of different drinks needed for a really good variety of interesting drinks. Bases and juice only go so far, which is why this happened of many years of collecting:

I've been looking at getting some strips of paper back LEDs you tear to a length, and then wire them all up, but today in Costco, we found some rope light. 18 feet to be precise for the princely sum of £13. And even better you can daisy chain them together 'safely' (so the box says) to make a single 300 foot string. 

Sadly i have no need nor space nor money for 300 feet o fit, so one strip for here and another for the kitchen has to suffice.

As a temporary fix until i can get some better stick on fixings and to make sure I hadn't wasted my money I've used some twist ties and ingenuity to fix it in place.

Happily, it looks pretty good, once it gets a front fascia to hide the rope from view from the rest of the room, i recon it'll look even better.

Next on the list is mounting the other set in the kitchen under the cupboard so I can see the worktop. Whoever designed the lighting in this house must really hate tall people. In the kitchen its right in the middle, so as soon as you're stood in front of any work surface or cupboard, you're blocking all direct light to anything. Even short people block the counter tops from light, its rubbish. But not for long...