Reader Question: New lighting in my kitchen?
Help! I just discovered your blog and love it! Thank you for sharing. What brought me here: I am in the early stages of a budget kitchen remodel. I live in a 1963 Royal Barry Wills Cape that was designed to look much older. There are black latches on the interior doors, not knobs, old fashioned windows, etc. My kitchen needed some updating, but I want to keep the cottage style. My kitchen is small --it's a wide galley with seven foot high ceilings.
I'm making plans to update the '70s tile ground with okayhardwood. I'm going to hire a expert to color the cabinetry Benjamin Moore White dove. I'm going to replace the cabinetry hardware, replace the Formica counters and installed a bead board ceiling.
What ceiling mild must I use and what counter cloth do you recommend? I love this Schoolhouse light for over the sink and I like soapstone counters however I'm concerned about sopastone's scratching and upkeep.
Thanks for the questions and I'd be happy to weigh in on both of them. Before I do although, in case you're in a Royal Barry Wills Cape Cod home, you certainly ought to test out Gina Milne's Willow Decor. Gina lives in a Royal Barry Wills home and is aware of more approximately that architecture than all and sundry I know.
You need to mild that room with a aggregate of recessed lighting fixtures for ambient mild and then a pendant over the sink and below cupboard lighting fixtures for challenge lighting fixtures. Despite the reality that your ceilings are as a substitute low, you need to go with recessed lights. Use 3- or 4-inch cans and use extra of them than you observed you need to.
Put all your lighting fixtures on dimmers so that you can manipulate the light tiers in that room based on what your wishes are. Do no longer use a relevant, ceiling mounted mild fixture. All you'll get is glare, something you want to avoid, avoid, keep away from. Think approximately the work regions with the intention to be on your new kitchen and area your cans accordingly. A mistake quite a few people make is to stay with a geometric format for recessed lighting with out regard to how that lighting fixtures has to be used.
Hang an interesting pendant light in the appropriate scale over the sink. It will add task lighting and at the same time become a focal point in your renovated kitchen. Use xenon box lights for under cabinet light like this:
Have them put on dimmers too. Don't use % lights because you will end up with a row of spot lighting fixtures. Kitchens need to be lit calmly to avoid glare and shadows.
But more than another recommendation I can deliver about lighting a kitchen, the high-quality recommendation I can deliver is to visit an independent lights shop and talk to a lighting fixtures designer. Lighting design is a career for a motive and no home center or website can give you the equal sort of provider and recommendation as an real, flesh and blood lights pro. Let a lights designer put together a lighting fixtures plan for you after which permit her or him deliver your lighting. It might be money nicely spent.
Now, thus far as soapstone to your counters, I say move for it. The neutral shade of soapstone will let you do something you want to colour-wise in that kitchen and it is completely suitable for a '60s-era Cape Cod home. While it is genuine that soapstone is gentle and it is able to be scratched, it truely has no renovation or preservation issues. Soapstone is absolutely non-reactive so you can not stain it and it's also non-porous. It receives used in chemistry labs for a very good reason. I have never met a person who has soapstone counters who did not additionally love them.
Often instances, humans wipe down their soapstone counters with mineral oil however that mineral oil isn't making the counter water proof or sealing it in any manner. Rather, mineral oil sits on the floor of the stone and oxidizes, making the stone look like darker. I wrote a protection of soapstone lower back in October and you may bounce to it right here: Please Pass the Soapstone.
So my recommendation is go to a lighting designer to get a format for a lighting fixtures plan after which say yes to soapstone.
And one final nugget of neighborly recommendation due to the fact I just cannot help myself. Purge the muddle. Get rid of all of the stuff in your counters except for one or matters that you use every day. If you need to show some thing, grasp it on a wall. If it won't hang on a wall get it from your kitchen. Nothing makes a small kitchen look even smaller extra than litter. Good good fortune!
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