New Light Resolutions

January 2, 2017

I have a confession to make. I love lighting.

I mean, I reeeeally love lighting! As a designer I feel thoughtful combinations of ambient, task, and accent lighting are essential to every room in the home, and my home is a testament to my philosophy. More lighting is better. Always. If that elicits an eye roll, let me share with you a rather ridiculous statistic that proves my commitment to this conviction: in our home we have 129 light bulbs. I just counted. And I didn’t even include outside lights, closet lights, garage lights, unfinished basement area lights, or any of my Christmas lights that are currently up.

{Here I will pause because I’m guessing now you want to walk around and count every lightbulb in your house….}

Well, we used to have 129 bulbs. Now it’s 137.

You see, our kitchen had an embarrassing problem. It’s so embarrassing I cringe to admit it. We had a boob light:

And it was right in the center of the room! Front and center! EXPOSED TO ALL EYES! I suppose in an unfinished storage closet far away from any and all prying eyes it would be acceptable, if you HAD to have one. But in the kitchen – the heart of the home – viewed by any and all guests?! I shudder to think of what we exposed people to for years! And so we made a resolution:

We recently replaced our old kitchen pendant lighting with a new fixture, so we decided that would be the jumping off point for the new fixture. Our kitchen pendant is this one from Allmodern.com:

We wanted the center light to be similar – a ‘tarnished silver’ finish with a bit of an industrial look, but simple so as not to take away from the coolness of the pendant. Oh, and it had to be basically be a flush mount as the center of the kitchen is only 7’ 6” high. We started by narrowing it down to these:

But none of them felt quite right. So I kept looking, and eventually found this one:

The height was right, it had simple lines yet was interesting, it looked industrial and it was cheap! Perfect! What we didn’t realize at the time is that we were ordering from China…straight from China. It took two months to get to us (and multiple emails asking them to please send us our light). It arrived in separate pieces, with no directions whatsoever for assembly, wiring, etc. But that wasn’t a big deal. I also knew I didn’t want to leave it black – I wanted the same finish as the pendant light (and also I really needed it to look less like a giant black spider on the ceiling ). So I ordered some Pewter Rub-n-buff from Amazon:

Once the light finally arrived, I got to work changing the color. I’ve never used this product before, but I loved it! A tiny bit went a long way (we still have most of the tube left), and it gave the black metal a beautiful rubbed pewter look. I rubbed this onto all the arms of the fixture with my finger and then buffed it with a soft cloth. I intentionally left it a bit uneven so it would have a worn look.