﻿What is up, my dear Aliholics. A couple of weeks ago I completed putting
this cloud light thing in my office room, and I wanted to document the process. In the end of
the video I will tell you 4 things that I wish I had done differently with this build.
The cost for the entire build was just under $50, and I will show you the renter-friendly
way of doing it, so if you put it up in a room in the house or an apartment that you don’t own,
it will be easy to remove it and even place it somewhere else without causing too much damage
to the ceiling or even the light setup. The whole thing took two evenings, and it can
realistically be done in just one. This is what my room looked like before,
just a regular normal home office. The first step is to acquire some old
or new pillows. I have both, a dollar store pillow with poly fil,
and some old pillows with memory foam. Optional step, pet the cute puppy.
I bought 6 A3-sized papers. Because I have a lamp and a smoke alarm in the
middle of the ceiling, this is the shape I have decided upon.
I have cut two of the papers in half because of the shape and the size of my ceiling.
To attach the papers to the ceiling I have used thumbtacks - I had a bunch of these, and I used
6 thumbtacks per A3 paper. The colour and shape doesn’t matter, because they
will be covered by the clouds anyway. I have tested the paper with just two to
see if they hold, and they worked fine. The genius trick I came up with to make sure they are aligned
parallel to the wall is to measure the distance between each of the paper corners with the wall.
As you can see I had to readjust it a bit. I have used 6 thumbtacks per the full-sized paper,
one on each corner and two more in the middle. They don’t have to be super perfectly aligned with
the ceiling, so just try to do your best. It took me about 30 minutes to put all
of the papers on the ceiling. This is where I have encountered my first
obstacle, which was the fire sprinkler. I took the measurements and decided to cut a hole in one
of the papers. It ended up being a little bigger than required, but that wasn’t a huge deal.
Here are the LED strips that I have bought for the light. Each roll is 15 feet,
so a total of 30 feet between the two rolls. They come with a USB splitter
and a Bluetooth chip to be controlled through the phone, and also a small basic remote.
So now the idea is to just attach the LED strip around the papers. Most, if not all LED strips
come with an adhesive strip pre-applied, so it’s an easy task to put them up. This took about
30 minutes. I have put them in lines, which was my second mistake. I’ll explain why later.
After the LED strips, it was the time to attach the clouds. I have used a can of spray glue,
it was the best suited type in my opinion because of how easy it was to use it. I sprayed a generous
amount on each cloud, and just pressed it into the paper and held it for a couple seconds.
I have realized that the poly fil was not the best option for realistic-looking clouds in
comparison to the memory foam, so I have decided to alternate between the two,
and add extra memory foam pieces next to the poly fil parts. Between the two memory foam
pillows and a pillow and a half with poly fil I had enough material to cover the whole area.
This is what the final result looks like. All things considered I am pretty happy, but here
are the things that I would do differently. 1. Instead of the hollow rectangle shape, I should
have measured the distance between the lamp and the fire alarm, and made a fuller coverage.
I think it would have been cool to have a more uninterrupted middle rather than a frame.
2. Instead of the linear shape, I should have put the lights in a zigzag pattern. This would
have given me a better light shape. Right now the middle is not as bright as the outer sides.
Having them in a zigzag shape would also help me manage the length better and more evenly.
3. Wear gloves during the gluing part. The overspray was pretty strong, and
the glue was hard to get off my hands after. 4. And my last mistake was not covering the floor
while I was spraying glue. I got a bunch of it on the floor, on my chair handles, on my desk, and
while I like the sticky cheap bar floor aesthetic, I would rather not have it in my home.
To get rid of the spray on the floor and furniture I have used Goo-gone spray, which
was amazing to get rid of the sticky parts. Here is what I did with the cable. I have used
a staple gun to attach the cable to the ceiling, and ran the USB extension through
the fake brick panels and along the wall. You can use the remote to control the light,
but the app is nice because it gives more control over the colour.
There is a simple wheel mode, and a full wheel with extra colours.
There is also a mode where it matches the music tempo, but since I didn’t want to get copyright
claims on this video, here is a recording of my call with my internet provider.
There is also a shake mode, which in my opinion is kind of a useless gimmick. Another option is
to pick the color from the image. I am using the Faceapp image of me as a young woman.
This is kind of it. Links to the LED strips that I have used are in the description. For the next
video I will have a test of viral TikTok products, so if you haven’t subscribed yet, please do!