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Ah, the late-night trip to the bathroom: a sometimes-necessary but always-maligned ritual.
We’ve all been there, stomping slowly down the hall like a zombie (perhaps even less gracefully), stepping across the bathroom threshold, flicking on the lights and getting completely blinded in the process. Perhaps inevitably, you stub your toe and emit a few choice words into your echoing bath chamber.
Sometimes, this is what it feels like to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.
Once your business is done, you march to the lightswitch (don’t forget to wash your hands!) and flip off the vanity lights, and are blinded once again as your eyes are forced to re-adjust to total darkness. By the time you return to bed, you’re still seeing stars and halos, your toe is still hurting, and it takes you another fifteen minutes for your eyes to settle and the slight buzzing headache to go away so you can fall back asleep.
But what if we could enjoy our late night trip to the bathroom without having to blind ourselves in the process (and still see our surroundings well enough to “aim” properly)? What if we didn’t even have to raise a finger to turn on a light switch?
Here’s our crazy idea, if you’re feeling a little “MacGyver” today:
Try some motion-activated bathroom vanity underglow for an easy, subtle, ambient lighting solution.
Ta-Da!
With a few feet of LED rope lighting or EL wire, you can illuminate the ground beneath your feet and create a soft, lounge-y lighting atmosphere. It’s attractive, it’s effective, it keeps your toes from stubbing and it prevents your poor eyes from burning. The folks over at DIY Network give a little more insight into the concept.
But here’s an idea to make your bath cabinet rope lights even more luxurious: Pair the lights up with a PIR motion sensor so they turn on automatically whenever a person enters the room.
Now if you’re like me, you probably don’t know much (here, “much” is defined as “anything”) about programming a PIR motion sensor. I wouldn’t know how to begin syncing it up with my rope lights. But there is a forum over on 43oh.com discussing this very topic EDIT: thread was taken down, we have removed the link, sorry for any inconvenience. This intrepid inventor, dubbed “Fred,” has a great idea and shares his steps for implementing it.
SCIENCE!
With the right know-how, it is easy and inexpensive to outfit your bathroom vanity with perfect undermount lighting to lend just the right amount of ambient glow to your bathroom, to make those midnight pit-stops bearable and put an end to blind eyes and stubbed toes for good!
[…] Great Bathroom Idea: Motion Sensitive Ambient Lights […]