Last week, we did a project that has been 5 years in the making.
When @wash11 and Amy got their house, one of the things that really needed upgraded was their kitchen lighting. It consisted of two tiny 40 watt can lights and was dark as a cave and terrible.
We were going to do a full lightning makeover-but then life, budget, and later Covid got in the way, and for one reason or another, it just never happened.
Boy, was I tired of trying to pour drinks in the dark!😄😄
Finally a couple of weeks ago, after getting tired listening to me bitch and using Joel’s crappy lighting as an excuse for my even crappier cocktail pouring skills, he finally said “Fine. What will it take to fix the lighting?”
I simply said”Just turn us loose and stand back.”
And that was that.
It’s a testament to our relationship that he didn’t ask any more questions, and just turned the whole thing over to us and trusted our judgment to make it all good.
Here’s what it was. Two little lights, and a skylight that actually works good when it’s sunny-but for some reason goes really dark once the sun goes down. 😄😄🤷♂️
Knowing we were about to make a truly epic mess between drywall dust and blown in insulation, we put on some protection. 😄😄
About 2 hours of layout work and double checking measurements resulted in a lot of blue tape on the ceiling to help us visualize the lighting layout before we started making holes.
We have some handy tools for helping to figure this out.
After as much double checking as possible, we broke out the hole saws and proceeded to wreck havoc on Joel’s ceiling. 😄🙄
Here’s Denise fishing around in insulation for the wire and glow rod I’m sending her way from another hole. She really enjoys this part. 😄😄
Here we both are elbow deep in Joel’s ceiling. 😄😄
The mess is hard to comprehend if you can’t see it in person, but here’s an idea of what it looks like. 😬
The above picture just doesn’t do justice to how big a mess opening up a blown insulation ceiling and then fishing wires around actually makes.
I don’t care what you do, shit just gets everywhere. It’s just a disaster.
And it was right at this point that Joel and Amy, who had been out on meat deliveries, came home after a long day on the road to find their kitchen destroyed.
They took one look at the mess, shook their heads, and excused themselves to their bedroom and closed the door. 😄😄
An hour or so later, we had all the wires fished, the fixtures installed, and then began the cleanup effort.
Most of the mess rolls up in the plastic we covered everything in, but inevitably there’s a lot of stuff that needs swept, vacuumed, mopped and dusted.
The concept we had for the new lighting setup was a two pronged approach. We wanted really bright lights with good color rendering for kitchen task lighting, but we also wanted some softer lighting for times when the harsher task lighting is just over powering-mood lighting, if you will.
I’m a big believer in installing more lights than you might think necessary to minimize shadows and give you the ability to have maximum light output, and putting those lights on a dimmer so the light can be fine tuned to fit the occasion. To that end, we set 8 can lights set at 4000K for a near-daylight lighting effect, with a Lutron dimmer to set the lights anywhere from “Holy shit that’s bright!”, to “It’s midnight and I need to sneak a snack. “
For the mood light, we chose to hang three small minimalist pendants with amber coated LED Edison bulbs at a soft and warm color temperature of 2100K. It was important to have small fixtures here, so as not to overwhelm the small space and ceiling that isn’t really that high, yet provide inviting warm light to the kitchen and living room spaces. These fixtures are also controlled by a Lutron dimmer, and as the bulbs can be tuned from surprisingly bright to barely lit, they are capable of being dialed in to suit just about any mood. I personally really love how these turned out and how they look and work.
Anyway, without further ado-here’s how it all turned out.
We got this done just ahead of some drywall repairs and painting that’s about to happen, so that’s when the hole left by the original little can light ( currently covered in blue tape to keep the insulation in) will be filled back in.
And there you have it-another day in the life of an off-grid solar installer that has nothing to do with off-grid solar!😄😄
Well, that’s not quite fair-this house is off-grid solar powered, so that counts, right?