Cozy Reading Nook with Cafe Lights

My daughter’s room needed some help! She is a stuffed-animal girl, and her one lone shelf was overflowing. So of course, one thing led to another – – first, we needed to have LOTS of shelving, and I thought crates would be perfect. Well, once they were filled with stuffed animals, it was so COZY and I knew it’d be a perfect reading nook with a few tweaks – like adding books 😉 And the perfect lighting. Note the before and after of the Cozy Reading Nook with Cafe Lights – it’s pretty perfect!!

You are for sure going to want to make your own reading nook!! Be sure to pin this idea for later. (This post may contain affiliate links)

I know you’ll enjoy this quick video seeing it all come together!

Cozy Reading Nook with Cafe Lights

Let’s break it down for you – – You’ll need:

—Crates

—Cafe Lights

–board to use as a base (1×12)

First up, clear out your area. Then you’ll need put a board down for a stable support of the crates – you’ll need this only if you’re stacking on carpet like we were – I used a “common board”, I think it was a 1×12.

Start stacking crates every which way. Start in the middle and then fill in. I wouldn’t go more than 3 or 4 crates high without adding supports. And be sure your child is old enough to know that these aren’t for climbing on 😉 (my daughter is 9, so this is perfect for her – I wouldn’t do this sort of storage in a 2 year old’s room though, unless I added brackets in the back.) . Here’s the pattern that we made:

Now the fun part – the lights!! The cafe lights are really what transforms this from just a storage wall into a really fun and cozy reading nook space.

We used the Enbrighten Cafe Lights by Jasco and they were awesome – I anticipating buying several more strands for our deck lighting. They are really sturdy and provide a perfect amount of light, and we used them inside for this project, but they’re also weatherproof for outdoors. I love the look of cafe lighting for this instead of traditional lighting because it adds fun and personality to the space while still having a bright warm glow. They’re LED and I love that they never have to be replaced!

We used an old crib bedspring to hang the lights – you know I love putting those to use! I also considered building an old-time “ladder” or wooden frame and using that. So whatever you decide to use, you just start wrapping the light strand around it and keep draping until it’s covered. You do want to keep in mind where your plug is and which end of the cord is where – you’ll see in the video we hung our light frame and then realized we had the plug on the wrong side, so we had to take it down and flip it.

I debated how to hang it and almost went with chain, but ended up settling on twine. But I still think chain would be cool! We made loops around the frame and then used those to suspend the frame.