Many thanks to OP and all the other contributions in here 
Thanks to you guys I was able to create a light abstraction for some IR-only lights, and it works perfectly now 
I have created a simple GitHub repo to document my progess. The code specifically replicates the IR Remote that came with the lights I wanted to control, but it should be relatively straight forward to adapt it to some other remote that you got. Feel free to give it a look 