New Kitchen Lighting | ORC Week 2

Week 2 of the Fall One Room Challenge is all about the new kitchen lighting we have chosen for our kitchen makeover.

Hey friends!  It’s week 2 of the fall One Room Challenge, and I’m sharing our progress on the kitchen makeover we are working on.  If this is your first time checking in on our kitchen makeover, you may want to start at Week 1, where I shared our plans for this space.  Week 2 is all about the lighting in our kitchen.  We changed out the lighting over our kitchen island, and I’m also sharing a little about the other lighting we selected for this space as well.  So let me share our new kitchen lighting with you.

You may or may not have seen my previous three ORC makeovers, and if not, you can click through to see my guest/kids bathroom makeover that I completed, my downstairs bathroom makeover that I completed, and my boys bedroom makeover.

If you have not heard of the One Room Challenge (also called ORC), currently in its 14th season, is a widely anticipated biannual event every April and October.  Each round, twenty design bloggers take the challenge and transform a space.  It is hosted by Linda from Calling It Home and Better Homes and Gardens.  Wednesdays is the day for the design bloggers to go live with their progress, and Thursdays is the day for all the guest participants to go live.  You guys will be amazed at these reveals, they are just beyond words good!

If you found me through the ORC Link up, welcome!  I am so happy you are here!  My name is Nicki and I am the blogger behind Sweet Parrish Place.  I love to share our DIY and home decor shenanigans, along with some organization, fashion, travel and other lifestyle types of topics.  Thanks for reading!  

Industrial Metal Cage Light

I desperately wanted to replace the lighting over our kitchen island.  And, I especially wanted to add more light to the kitchen.  I have always felt that this kitchen was too dark, at night in particular.  I would have a hard time seeing when I was chopping vegetables and things like that.  There are two recessed lights in this kitchen, and then the light over the island.  That was it when we moved into this home.  The two recessed lights are in the nook part of the kitchen where the kitchen door and the two windows are.  So they really don’t do much good as task lighting.  So my main goal was to add a lot more lighting in this kitchen, and I wanted to achieve that by replacing our existing light over our island.

Please note: Some of the links in this post are affiliate links, which allows me to make a small commission from your purchase, but your price stays the same.

Here, you can see the light that was there when we moved in, and has still been there up until very recently.  It isn’t that I hated the light so much as the fact that I felt this pot rack light took up way to much visual space in this small-ish kitchen.  I felt compelled to hang things off it, and I never liked the look of hanging all the things like that right in the middle of this kitchen.  Things that were hanging there were literally getting in the way of us utilizing this kitchen island the way we need to.  And people were always hitting their heads on something.

Not to mention the fact that it put out horrible light.  The lightbulbs were surrounded by these black globes, and the light was only shining directly down, not around the room.  Does that make sense?  And, I had the brightest light bulbs in it that I could put in it.  So needless to say, I was no sorry to see this light go.  We took it down and posted it on Facebook Flea Market, and it was sold on that same day.

And so began my search for a new kitchen lighting.  If you don’t remember from week 1 of this challenge, we are renovating this kitchen on a budget.  So I was looking for something less than $200, I knew I wanted at least three lightbulbs, and I knew I wanted the bulbs to be fairly exposed so that as much would travel around the room as humanly possible.  My days of using my phone flashlight to cut vegetables were soon to be over!  I found the particular light on Amazon, and it’s description calls it an Industrial Antique metal cage light, but also a rustic farmhouse light, so it’s a little confused as to what style it is, but either way, I was drawn to it.

I liked the flat black base because I knew that would jive with my cabinet and drawer pulls I was planning for., and I thought the rope detail was really fun.  It puts me in the mindset of the light we installed over our master bathtub area.  So I felt like it would be nice to have that bit of coordination in the two light fixtures, even though they are in different rooms.  I want the whole house to have the same vibe, know what I mean?  I also needed the light fixture we chose to be able to be mounted all in one piece. That felt less complicated to us because we were planning to install it ourselves.  So all we wanted to do was to take the old light down and install the new light in the exact same spot.  No rewiring.  But do you wanna know what really sold me on this light fixture?  Any guesses?  It was those two extra lightbulbs on either end!  I mean, I just think that is so cool!  It was like that light was made for my needs!

I was going to be getting 5 lightbulbs where there once were three.  And the caged lighting allows for the light to shine all around the room instead of just straight down.  Plus, look how cool the rope detail is!  I added this photo below to show you the different fun things you can do with this light.  Sooooo fun, right?

I have to admit, I took these photos on my iPhone, and these are completely unstyled.  But I wanted to share the progress we have made, and it was just all we had time for this week.  I have a hard time with photos that have a window behind them.  So this photos looks hazy.  But, you may notice in this photo below that we also hung new curtains in the kitchen!  And yes, I actually did that before we painted the cabinets or the room.  I was just dying to do something quickly that would brighten this space a bit.  They will come down so that we can paint the room, but they will be put back up afterwards.  I just wanted to see what some long sheer white curtains would look like, and I really like them a lot.  I will get into more details about this part of the room in a later post.

I did my best to capture a photo with the lights on, but that is not my forte.  So this is the best I could do on my phone.  If you look at the photo below, you can see one of the recessed lights that I mentioned were in this little nook.  We also changed out the bulbs in those to a brighter bulb.  I want this room to light up  super bright at night.

I added two of those vintage looking edison bulbs on either end of this light fixture.  And then some warm white LED bulbs inside the cages.  I thought that would look really cool when the lights were on, but unfortunately, you can’t really tell much of a difference between the two.

Also, the ceiling is pretty rough, and we had a leak over the summer that discolored the ceiling.  So we will be hiring someone to paint the ceiling, becaseu although I do all of my painting myself, the ceiling just doesn’t sound fun.  So it will be hired out.

We are both super happy with this light.  The kitchen is so much brighter!  I can’t even tell you how much easier it is  to see and cook in here at night now.  It’s actually so bright that when we first installed it, it was startling to us for awhile, but we have now happily adjusted.  And for me to be cooking in here at night?  It’s like a dream.  I can’t believe how much of a difference changing this light fixture out was to the brightness in this room.  Plus, this light takes up waaaay less visual space, which is a huge plus in my book.

If you look at the photo below, you will see the other spot where we will be adding a new light, and that is to the wall there over the kitchen sink.  I toyed with the idea of removing those two cabinets over the sink so that we could add pendant lighting or something.  But I need the storage too desperately.  We also discussed moving the cabinet up a bit higher than the other cabinets, but that would have messed up my lovely DIY faux subway tile backsplash that I don’t want to replace.

My husband was not on board with hiring an electrician to come and install a wall sconce in this spot, which I would have loved to do, so I set out to find a wall sconce I liked that could be plugged into the wall, and decided that having a light hardwired into this spot would have to wait for another day.  But it is something I would like to do eventually.  I found this modern black wall sconce at Amazon as well, and it was less than $50.  I like the touch of natural wood this wall sconce has, I like the brass accent as well.  Plus, I felt like it coordinated really well with the new light fixture.  It is already installed, but I’m not going to share photos today, because I don’t want to reveal too much.  We have already painted the cabinets, but that reveal is for a different week, so for now, you just get a photo of the light I chose.  I also bought this under cabinet light bar to add under the cabinet closest to where I chop a lot of vegetables.  It is battery operated and was very inexpensive.  And you can’t see it at all under the cabinet, unless you turn it on.

Modern Black Wall Sconce

I found this little table lamp at Walmart, of all places.  It has a real marble base, and I loved the brass finish.  I thought it would coordinate with the brass accents in the wall sconce, and I wanted to add in another metal other than stainless steel.  I actually didn’t buy this when I first saw it, but after I got home, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, so I went back later that evening and bought it.  I have a dark little corner next to our microwave where we have always had a lamp, and this will be perfect there.  I think the marble base goes really well with the new counters.

Better Homes & Gardens Brushed Brass Finish Marble Base Uplight Table Lamp

So what do you think of our lighting choices for our kitchen?  I think I did pretty well with my selections, on a budget.  Next week, I will be sharing the progress we have made with painting our kitchen cabinets!  I’m so excited to share!  We are painting them with the color simply white by Benjamin Moore.  So stay tuned for next Thursday where I will be sharing lots of pictures of the painted cabinets!

To Do List For Kitchen Makeover

• paint cabinets white
• replace cabinet and drawer pulls
• replace lighting over island
• replace over sink lighting
• add new top to existing kitchen island
• paint back door
• add open shelving
• turn two kitchen cabinets into open shelving
• paint ceiling
• paint walls
• replace curtains
• add new accessories and decor
• paint ceiling

If You Like It, Then You Wanna Put a Pin On It

Before I go, I wanted to mention that I am an Amazon Influencer, and I now have a storefront that is up and running!  You can click here to go to my page.  You will find this smart lock there, along with loads of other things that myself and my family have ordered and love.  I have all sorts of different things linked there, including things that I have already ordered myself and things that are currently on my wish list.

Do you have champagne taste and a tiny budget too? 
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