You need a beam thick enough to house a light bulb, I would recommend 6″ at least. Finding a beam of this length should be “easy”. Most people hunting for hand hewn barn beams are looking to build something much longer. Our Barn Beam light fixture measures 4″x4″x 3.5′.

Cut your beam to the desired length.

I love this lightbulb. It’s long, has smoked grey glass and edison style filament (even though it’s LED).

The first thing to do is determine where the bulb will go. Take a pencil and trace the outline of the lightbulb and the lightbulb socket on to the wood.

This is an arduous process but not a complicated one. I tried all sorts of tools to efficiently hollow out the core, the method that worked best for me was my hand drill and forstner bit set. I drilled holes as deep as I could within the traced line. I made the socket side pretty tight and gave some extra breathing room around the bulb.

I then used my hammer and chisel to clean the wood up. I repeated this process until the bulb and socket fit snug and straight. It’s okay if you went too deep on some parts, the key is to have enough of the wood touching the back of the bulb (we are going to use superglue later).

In this picture you can still see some of the forstner bit remnants – that’s okay, you can’t see it unless you’re looking directly up.

Critical step that you should not overlook: test the fit AND the light distribution. Set the bulb in and plug in the light. Eventually you will drill through and run the cord neatly but for now the focus is on light distribution.

During this test, I noticed some cool cracks that were a bit too narrow to allow for light to escape. I used a chisel to widen these cracks to allow more light to flow through them. I asked my wife to hold the light up above the bar so that I could see how the light hit the bar. I continued to remove wood and chip at cracks until the light distribution was exactly how I wanted it.

Do not rush this step. The goal isn’t just to make a light, it’s to make a light that looks exactly how you want. You can not go back and fix this, take the time and get it right before you move on.

This is a relatively easy step in building a hanging fixture. Dry fit the bulb and cord, allowing for a little bit of cord to stay in the fixture, mark a spot inside the hollowed portion of the beam where the plug should run through. Keep in mind, you will be screwing pipe fittings towards the middle of the beam, be sure not to drill a hold for the plug too close to the center. Remove the bulb and socket, then take a sturdy drill bit and drill through that mark from the inside out. You should now have a little hole at the top of your barn beam fixture.

Using a forstner bit that is large enough to fit a plug through (NOT large enough to fit a socket)  cut a hole from the top down.

My DIY bar has pipe for a footrest as do the shelves that I made for the whiskey bottles. I wanted to tie everything together with this light fixture. I decided that two pipes connected to a beam would provide plenty of support for the fixture.

You can customize this how you would like but the most important part is to screw fittings into ceiling joists, do not attempt to hang a fixture like this with drywall anchors.

This picture illustrates my design. I ziptied the cord to the back of the pipe so that it was out of sight. I am using corrugated metal roofing (post coming on that soon).

Oh boy, some purists are about to get their feathers ruffled. If you appreciate a good even layer of polyurethane then I advise that you skip this video. I broke the rules on this one. Barn beams are rigid, rugged, bumpy, holey things – that’s what makes them so cool.

To that end, you can not apply polyurethane in the traditional sense. Instead, use a brush and try to get into every crack and crevice after you have done this, feather the brush in a single direction. The easiest way to do this is to hold the brush at an angle and lightly brush the surface from end to end. 

As mentioned above, we need to screw our fixture into ceiling joists. If your mounting this on a wall, then find the studs. Using a….stud finder :).

I screwed my fixture in using 2″ wood screws and then tested its strength by hanging on it. At 180lbs the fixture mount held up well.

After, I lined my barn beam up, this is without the bulb installed. My wife and nephew held the beam straight as I screwed the beam into the pipe fitting with eight wood screws. If your wood is thick enough, your screws should not be visible from the underbelly. If they do poke through then use smaller screws where necessary.

Make sure that this is a solid fit. I put about half of my weight on the fixture to make sure that it was nice and sturdy.