Mom and Her Drill

Behold the tutorial for the the rest of us! And I even made a graphic for Pinterest because I love you:
If you can use a glue gun, you can do this. Here are the things you need:
A soldering gun/iron. You can get one like this, and notice how cheap! Every girl should have one.
Solder. (This is the "glue" for your "glue gun")
 I bought 2 reels and a transformer here & here.  The transformer comes with a little tiny plug that you have to cut off and expose the black & red wires. Below shows how to cut the LED reel into pieces and solder each one. (The strips of lights have adhesive on the back to stick to your shelves.) Use the wire strippers to expose the bare wires for soldering.
Here is a Youtube tutorial on how to use a soldering gun, but it works just like a glue gun. Instead of the glue being pushed through the hot nozzle, however, you have to hold the solder against the tip to melt it. CAREFUL HERE: don't get any solder between the positive and negative circles, they have to be kept separate.

 Here is how I ran the speaker wire from each shelf up to the top, where I had installed an outlet:



 I plugged the transformer into the wall, and then I had to bundle all the speaker wires together. You MUST keep track of all the wires so that all the "positives" are bundled together, and the "negatives" are together.
 Here is a close up of the other end of the transformer. Cut off the plug that was there previously to expose the black and red wires, and then twist together with the appropriate bundle. They are held together with a wire nut. (that plastic cap thing)
(wire strippers needed here as well, to expose the end of each wire so you can bundle them together -they all have to make contact with each other.)

this will be covered by the pieces of wood trim on the front edges of all the shelves, so you won't see the wires or holes etc.
NOTE: transformers can go bad, so make sure you've got access if you need to replace it. I'm going to have to cut an access panel in the top of the bookcase, and cover it with a thin piece of wood. I'm going to be building the top of these bookcases up with crown molding, so I need to be able to access the transformer another way.

I should have just plugged this into the outlet down at the bottom of the wall, but at the beginning of this project I thought that I was going to install bookcase "lamps" at the top of each one... this design change made a little more work for me but it's ok. :) Here is the post where I showed the wiring for the new switch and outlet (these LED lights are controlled by a switch I installed in the wall first.)