The New Kitchen Light

As you know, we bought our house with intentions of fixing it up. There was a lot of “interesting” going on (this picture really boasts much of that -- wallpaper, wallpaper, YELLOW!) So the florescent light in the kitchen, while not my ideal look, was far, far, far down on my list of things to change.

 But apparently my house was more sick of it than I was, because one night it detached half of it from the ceiling! Rather than go through the work of getting re-attched safely, we just took it down. And I started online shopping for a new one.  Let me tell ya, there are not a lot of good options for 8’ ceilings, when it will be your only source of light for the space. (As in I don’t have pinterest-kitchen standard recessed lighting, so that there can be a barely bright accent light, just for beauty.)  

After tons and tons and tons of online shopping. 

And some pretty notable frustraition on the subject,

I found this light.

But it was out of stock, everywhere I looked.

I wasn’t sure this was “the ultimate light” but for the constraints I was working with (need as much light as possible, need as much head room as possible but don’t really like flush mount lights, aiming towards a kind-of-sort-of farmhouse look) I thought it was the best I could come up with.

Although admittedly the nickel needed to be oil rubbed bronze to match my other light, and feel farmhouse-y. But ORB spray paint is the most convincing of the metal spray paints, so I thought I could make it happen.

But like I said, out of stock. So no dice.

Then after kind of giving up for a while, I re-searched and saw there was suddenly “1 left” on amazon.

I was nervous (I put too much pressure on getting things right) but Blake and I finally (and quickly, incase someone else was wanting it too) said “just buy it.”

I ordered and waited.

Then when I opened the box, it was kinda bent and kind of tarnished.

Now what?

It was still out of stock, so sending it back would leave me back at square one.

I didn’t like square one.

So I got in touch with Amazon and they said if I’d like to keep it they’d give me a 30% discount.

After thinking it over for like a week, we deiced we could bend it back (good enough) and I had wanted to spray paint it anyway, so the tarnish was no biggie and that it was still worth the new price to us. (In case you follow the link to see the light on Amazon, for some reason they have upped the price on this light, even though it’s currently out of stock. Our price for this light after our damaged discount was about $100.)

After I officially gave word to Amazon that we wanted to keep it, I took it outside to spray paint.

You guys, I was kinda close to hyperventilating. I love to spray paint thrifted things. But I’ve never spray painted something brand new. This was the most expensive thing I’ve ever spray painted. And to make matters worse the last two (separate) attempts of mine to use spray paint went poorly due to faulty cans. So before I started this light I had pray and to do some very purposeful breathing.

Thankfully, it went really well this time. And I was very happy with the finish on the light.

And over the weekend I got our ceiling painted (it was green where the light used to be) and Blake hung the light.

(I should have done more work to the ceiling -- it needs to be mudded and sanded to get a better finished smooth look. But sometimes you admit that you have a baby and you’d rather just have a light on your ceiling than have things be perfect -- that you’ll have to double back later, and that’s ok.)

So here it is! Pretty ain’t she?

For dramatic effect, let’s revisit where we started out with the rooms:

And here we are today (sorry it’s “lived in” not cleaned up fancy style):

It’s hard to get an angle to show how the lights play together. 

Feels pretty good!

We still wanna paint the cabinets and change the range hood and range.
But we’ve made major progress in here!