Indoor growing upgrade - DIY illuminated plant shelf

I will promise, I'll stop making these DIY posts and bake something again. However I think my sourdough died because of mold. Luckily I'll get some more from a friend of mine next week, but I won't have time to make sourdough mead for midsummer.

But now, back to the project. The plan was to build a shelf for plants and add lights for the plants. This was the orignial "plan" I presented to my wife:

This beautiful piece was drawn with Paint 3D, the yellow presents the lamp and the back is brown only to give some contrast in the image.

The size was limited as at some point it'll be used under the stairs, but so far it has been allowed to be closer to a window.
32cm in depth (approx. 2cm from the timebr in the back), 100cm wide and 180cm high. The levels of the shelf were 30cm in depth and approx. 96cm wide (100cm wide - 2cm per side).

I had bought the timber as pre-glued and pre-cut pieces, but none of them was exactly the correct size, as you can imagine they don't sell 96cm long pieces of wood. Also the back was 1 meter wide so I used three pieces, 30-40-30cm wide to get the full meter. Because of the back consists of 3 pieces, I decided to use angle irons and nail plates to attach pieces together.

There are two levels for the plants and both will have two fluorescent tubes for now. I could add some more lights later, but I'm hoping this will be enough for now.

The lights power cords will go through the back from drilled holes.

I forgot to take a picture of this, but I had added 100mm wide pieces of wood on both levels as a cover. As the angle irons, lamps and the cords both will be utlimately hidden, the finished shelf will have a nice look.

Once again, most of the project were both screwing everything together and then painting the finished shelf. I wish I had taken more photos of the process, but I'm mostly proud of the finished product.

As seen above, the lamps and everything else is hidden. The pieces in back didn't turn out as perfect, as most likely due to a small shrinkage a small gap formed. It doesn't bother me though, but everyone should be aware that wood expands and shrinks mostly because of humidity. I could have tried to glue the 300-400-300 -pieces together, but I didn't have anything to press them together with.

After a quick paint (during which I dropped the paint bucket on the floor and got some paint on my face) the only other surface treatment I did was adding some wax to the inner surfaces. They are most likely to be in contact with a little bit of water, so all I wanted was to give an easy protection for the shelf and the paint.