LED strips are an affordable way to recreate any room in your home. LED strip lights allow you to control the space’s ambiance. Are you feeling relaxed? Change them to blue. Are you feeling happy? A warm yellow will further that cheery mood of yours.
Besides affordability, and the changing color factors, LED strips are incredibly easy to install, and you can place them wherever your heart desires. With endless possibilities at hand, these 18 LED strip light ideas will leave you excited for your next DIY design project, which will give one or all of your rooms an impressive lighting facelift.
Contents
- 1. Kit Out Your Cabinetry
- 2. Outline Shelves
- 3. Stick Them Beneath Your Furniture
- 4. Light Up Your Mirrors
- 5. Create A Gamers Paradise
- 6. Illuminate The Staircase
- 7. LED Your Artwork
- 8. Celebrate Your Ceiling
- 9. Line The Walls
- 10. Liven Up Your Headboard
- 11. Make LED Art
- 12. Highlight Recessed Spaces
- 13. Make Your Wardrobe A Wonderland
- 14. Enlighten Dark Storage
- 15. Accentuate Your Aquarium
- 16. Embrace Your Bathtub
- 17. Lighten The Wine Rack
- 18. Illuminate Your Landscape
1. Kit Out Your Cabinetry
Your kitchen cabinets have the potential to shine, and LED strips make that happen. You can place the strips beneath your upper cabinets to illuminate the counters as task lighting, but the fun doesn’t end there!
You can also place the LED strips along the top of your upper cabinetry, where it meets the ceiling, to achieve a halo effect. This idea works exceptionally well with an all-white kitchen, giving it a warm glow no matter what color you choose. If both above and below are too much for you, you can do one on its own, and it will still look stunning.
2. Outline Shelves
If you’re looking for LED ideas, your shelving is a terrific place to start. You can outline the outside of the frame, along the internal crevices, or just along the horizontal planes to give it a dreamy aesthetic. Shelves are made to exhibit books and ornaments, and LED strips take displaying to the next level.
Whether your shelving is a single unit in your dining room or two free-floating shelves in your study, LED strips can do it all. You can even light each shelf level a different color by laying out separate strips. You will simply love how the LEDs brighten a room’s ambiance while giving the books and ornaments a new sense of life.
3. Stick Them Beneath Your Furniture
If you’d like to feel as if you’re floating on cloud nine, this LED illumination trick is for you. You can create a halo of light beneath your furniture by laying down LED strips along the perimeter. This method works best with beds and sofas, but the sky is your limit!
You can also define the base of cupboards, tables, chairs even the bottom of a standing sculpture if you have one. By outlining the base of your furniture, the lighting makes the object appear as if it is floating like you’re in outer space. This method of illumination reimagines design borders – quite literally.
4. Light Up Your Mirrors
Your mirrors are a perfect place to add light, as they reflect and give the room a bright glow and a stunning atmosphere. You’ll want to border your mirrors with the LED strips, which can either be placed on the mirror borders or behind them.
If you choose to line LEDs on the mirror, it will give a vanity mirror effect, which is absolutely perfect for a top-notch selfie or putting on makeup. If you place LED strips behind it, the strips are more likely to stick due to the plain surface.
The glow will be softer and make it look like it’s floating, but it still offers enough light for day-to-night mirror tasks. If you’re using LEDs in the bathroom, make sure they’re waterproof with an IP67 rating.
5. Create A Gamers Paradise
You can light any part of your gaming room, but multiple sources work best. Gaming and LED strip lighting go hand in hand. These strip lights set the mood for hours of gaming, and once paired with an LED mouse and keypad, you’ll get transported to an ambient paradise.
You can cover the borders at the back of your screen, along the outlines of your walls, on the ceiling, or on the back of your desk. The colorful hues aid your late-night missions so that you don’t have to face the white harshness of standard lighting, nor do you have to squint to grab a sip of your drink.
6. Illuminate The Staircase
Your staircase may often go unnoticed as a place to decorate with lights, but LED strips will transform the space brilliantly. You can trace the stairs along the sides or highlight each tread individually. This sleek, modern lighting scheme will give your staircase all the design appeal it needs.
Staircase lighting will ensure you don’t miss a step in the dark while giving your home a cinematic feel. If the steps aren’t your thing, the barricade is also a perfect place to line an LED strip. You’ll want to ensure that the power source is well hidden and the strips are secured to avoid any tripping hazards.
7. LED Your Artwork
You can accentuate your artwork with LED strips to make them pop. Whether you have one giant art piece or many small ones, you can surround them with a color-changing LED strip to make a typical art wall a main attraction.
You’ll want to place the strips along the outside of each frame. The fun part is seeing your favorite artwork in a whole new light when the colors change. Luckily LED light strips don’t cause any harm to artwork, unlike other heat-producing lights. The light rays of LED strips are also a non-issue.
But don’t stick them directly onto the artwork, in case you want to remove the strip later on.
8. Celebrate Your Ceiling
LED strips on the ceiling will bring a lovely layer into your lighting scheme, and they’re not too bright that they take over. To compliment your roof, you can line the strips along all the cornices to highlight the entire area. This method is best for bedrooms and studies, but there are no rules!
If your ceiling has recessed parts, you can frame them with LEDs for drama. If you don’t have a layered roof, you can add 3D ceiling panels to highlight with LED strips. If you want to install 3D paneling, it would be best to hire a professional. The style it brings is well worth the money and effort.
9. Line The Walls
Your wall space is an ideal spot for LED strips, no matter which room you want to spruce up. Want an eccentric bedroom or, better yet, an atmospheric bathroom? Lining the wall’s edges will elevate the room’s illumination into a place you’ll never want to leave.
You can light up one wall by lining strip lights around the corners from floor to ceiling and leave it at that or make a complete rectangle by including strips along the cornice and baseboard. One completely outlined wall will make it a feature, but if you’re up for a total LED takeover, you can define all the walls in the room or just the corners.
10. Liven Up Your Headboard
Your bedroom has many places for LEDs, but one special consideration is your headboard. LEDs along your walls might feel a bit too much, but accenting your headboard adds a softer touch that still looks fabulous.
You’ll want to trace the outer lines of your headboard with LED strips. Another reason this is a great spot is that the power source is easily tucked away beneath your bed. Once you’ve DIYed your headboard, you can lay back and enjoy the color-changing LEDs and set them to create any mood your heart desires.
11. Make LED Art
If you can get your hands on adjustable LED strips, you’re bound to have fun with this idea. You’ll benefit from LED art if you’re a 90s fan, and the good news is that the neon light style has come back in fashion.
This project requires thin LED strips, and you may need to cut the strip and reconnect some pieces. You can make art with the LED strips on a canvas by bending them in a way that makes a shape (like a heart or a word like ‘joy’ or ‘peace’) and tucking the excess wires through holes. LED art will take some research and a DIY tutorial to get right, but the results will be the most satisfying.
12. Highlight Recessed Spaces
If part of your wall recesses or you have indented architectural features like an alcove, you can celebrate it as a design element by highlighting the outlines with LED strips. You can define all the edges or focus on one or two prominent ones. By doing this, the feature stands out and adds a necessary drama.
If the hollow space is home to ornaments or plants, this is the best way to lighten them up. If you’re not a color-changing fan when it comes to architecture, you don’t need to worry. Plenty of warm and white lights LEDs are available that accentuate the area without being too in your face.
13. Make Your Wardrobe A Wonderland
Your wardrobe is a fashion haven, and LED strips will make finding your next fit fun and glamorous. If you have a standard wardrobe, you can accentuate all the outer edges by using a full-length strip, just the top, or just the bottom – any option will look stunning.
If you are blessed enough to have a walk-in closet, LEDs have even made their way into Jeffree Star’s, which looks spectacular – so that aspect should not get canceled! As mentioned in the other ideas, you can lighten the shelving, ceiling, walls, and mirrors to give your dressing station some LED shine.
14. Enlighten Dark Storage
Nothing is more frustrating than searching in your drawers and not finding the darn thing – cue: LED strips. This idea is best if you imagined a late-night hunt for your favorite snack in the kitchen drawer, but the leading lights would awaken your resting cat and alert your barely asleep toddler.
You open the drawer, switch on its LED strip, and ta-da, your Flaming Hot Cheetos, await. Sure, that is a hypothetical situation, but if you’re a sucker for convenience, you won’t regret LED strips in your storage spaces for those hard-to-see times.
15. Accentuate Your Aquarium
Your fish and coral will thrive in the light of LEDs and give you an extra reason to admire its underwater charm. You can define the edges of your tank with the strips. You can opt to cover the edges of the stand, the aquarium base, along the top border, the underside of the aquarium hood, or within the tank along the substrate.
You’ll need waterproof LED strips with an IP68 rating when dealing with a fish tank, or you’ll run into serious problems. Luckily, LEDs won’t bother fish, besides bright white light, and they don’t generate enough heat to affect the tank, but do pay attention to fish behavior after installing them just in case.
16. Embrace Your Bathtub
Your bathtub is a place of peace, and if you enjoy some bubbles after a difficult day at work, sparking up your favorite color for increased ambiance is hard to turn down. You can surround the base of your bathtub or the two corners of the bathroom wall where the bathtub is situated.
Did you know that colors can impact your psychology? It is a widely studied curiosity, but the feelings a color evoke is what aligns with you, so if you want to experiment with your emotions while you wind down, pick your most calming color, and relax away.
Of course for this use-case the LED strips need to be IP68 waterproof and they must be low-voltage for security. Another option would be battery-powered LED strips.
17. Lighten The Wine Rack
Your reserved wines are due for a dust-off and glow-up. Any wine connoisseur can appreciate a tasty glass, but decorating the beloved collection with LEDs is a lovely idea to give your wine cellar or bar area an extra kick. All you need to do is trace the outline or a few sections for a glow-up.
18. Illuminate Your Landscape
The great news is that you get landscape-worthy LED strips, and your outdoor area awaits creative lighting. You can outline your deck, patio stairs, flower beds, outdoor furniture, and overhanging roofing. The sky is the limit.
You even get solar-powered LEDs that will transform your outside space into a well-lit utopia – but you must ensure the lights are IP68 waterproof, and then you’re free to lighten the landscape far and wide.
