technically we are still remodeling the kitchen. like many people, i could say we are "mostly" done & we are and have been for some time. and like most people, we still have that laundry list of little things to complete. you know, the stuff that never gets done.
my biggest frustration in this entire project was lighting. i was not at all prepared for how expensive lighting is. "shock" is not an adequate word to describe what i felt every time i'd find a light that i loved & then saw the price. i mean, i get it, lighting is important & you want to get it right, but good lord getting it right is expensive.
so i just kept collecting little samples & hoping for the right light to come to me
we have a fortunate friend in Brandi because she was able to get us our
final dining room light at a good price. and while it was not
my 1st choice, in the end, it really is the better choice! as chance would have it, i actually saw my first choice installed in the
Barrington Beach House project on This Old House (sikp to scene 8 about 21:24 if you care), and while it's still a beautiful fixture, i'm much more pleased with our choice & think it's more appropriate for our space & style.
the other area i struggled with was the island. finding lighting that i love was never the problem. finding it at a price i was willing to pay was! okay, i can justify god knows what for a
faucet, but $250 for a light fixture is just ridiculous right? yeah. so to the InterWebs i went! i follow several diy "mommy" blogs & got some great ideas. my best came from
The Splurge or The Steal. i located a similar fixture at Lowes for $30 but, unfortunately, they didn't have a brushed nickel model. so some hammer spray paint later, i had these!
not bad. this got me by until i could find something more to my liking (style & price point). and it was Home Depot that came through for me at $99 each!
so i was not in complete love with this fixture, just a mild crush. but like all solid relationships, we started off friends & then something just kinda grew out of that. a little more googly googling & i found the standard height for a fixture over an island is 30", so of course, the hardware that comes with a light would be set for that that right? nay! our "out of the box" height was either going to be 27" or 33" - one was too high, the other too low! so thanks to our good friend Barry, we were able to cut the pipe & he tapped a new thread to get baby bear juuuust riiiight at 30".
so we have a "finished" product. def. finished = until i see something more shiny! actually,
we are in what i hope is the home stretch of lighting. we have LED light strips under the cabinets & that gives us good lighting for the bamboo counter tops. we recycled our old puck lights that once served as under cabinet lights, and now live on top of our cabinets for temporary up-lighting - i plan to replace those with LED strips just like the under cabinets.
however, we still need pot lights around the perimeter areas: stove, fridge, & dining shelving. you might notice in the pic above that we do have LED pot/spot lights in front of the windows, 3 to be exact, one for each window. in essence, it has come to this:
thanks to the IKEA online planner, i can at least attempt a lighting layout. items in yellow represent existing lighting (like the island & dining table). green represents lighting in question. see what i'm saying about 1-4? is it enough? too much? am i even close on spacing/positioning? i'm not too worried about 5-8. those will likely be spot lights like the ones currently in front of the windows. 6-8 highlight the shelves & the boxer art & 5 will highlight new boxer art for Baxter! so i'm down to 4 lights & then one more item off the check list - aka Home Stretch!
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