From the Kitchen File: Picking out the little things

     My last post was about choosing the three major finishes of a kitchen: cabinets, countertops and floors. It was a big relief to have those settled, but there were still other choices to be made. 

    One major factor in setting the feel of a kitchen is lighting. Our house is an early 90s house and the lighting situation was pretty dim (pun intended). The kitchen had a ceiling fan with 4 lights that looked original to the house, and the last owners had updated the breakfast nook and dining room with two insufficient pendant lights. The great room had another 90s ceiling fan, and the front living room had nothing, though I believe the former owners had swagged a light over to the center of the ceiling, but they took it with them. It just feels really dark for a house that has a good amount of windows. Also, the ceiling is textured, not with the popcorn/cottage cheese look, but a sort of fireworks-like pattern that I didn't mind too much but drives Josh crazy. So, since recessed lights are going in and will be making a lot of holes in the ceiling, and the portion of the ceiling where the wall is coming down has to be patched in anyway, we're getting all the ceilings on the first floor smoothed. The new lights and a smooth surface are going to make a BIG difference in the feel of these spaces.

    Choosing decorative lighting is hard (if you are picky). Much like hardwood floors, stores carry a pretty small sample of hardwired lights in the store, but if you get on the internet, there are ENDLESS choices and styles. And if you are like me, you will find something you really like, only to find out that a single pendant is $775, which is outrageous, and your plan calls for four pendants. 

Not kidding--this 9.5"-wide pendant cost $775!

We have a 10-foot island, and most kitchen experts would recommend then having two very large pendants or three medium-sized pendants over that length. That works great if you have tall ceilings, but we're working with regular old 8-foot ceilings, so while I'm drawn to those giant woven-basket style pendants, in our house they would be ridiculously oversized, blocking views and bumping foreheads. 

Interesting light fixtures. Kind of a weird kitchen.

    I decided to go for four small-but-not-mini pendants (9 to 10 inches wide) because then I can have one centered over the sink. Having one a foot off-center from the sink would bother me, and the point IS for them to be functional, not just decorative, and I'm starting from scratch with light placement so I can make symmetry and centeredness happen. I have been looking at pendant lights since December and now pretty much all of my Facebook ads are for lighting, which I appreciate because they really would see what vein I was going in and show me more similar things. But before I chose my pendant lights though, I stumbled across these pretty cool gallery lights at the incredibly affordable price (comparatively) of $99 for the large and $69 for the small at World Market. 

Gallery lights are meant to light up a picture directly below them. 

    I'm not sure if I saw gallery lights being used in a kitchen while I was doing my kitchen research of if it started when I was looking at built-in offices, but once I decided I want to go with some open shelving over the stove wall, the idea of gallery lights over the top shelf (to highlight art and plants and collective pieces) got me excited. I showed them to Josh and he was thinking about it, and then by the time I was ready to order them that weekend, World Market was quickly selling out. I thought I was going to get one large delivered from the website and two larges and one small at the store in Rockville because the internet had sold out. But they had oversold at the store and my order was canceled, so I started searching World Market locations all over the East Coast (and Knoxville, TN where a favorite cousin lives!) and a store in White Marsh that hadn't even opened yet, and it looked like I was out of luck. But then three days later, I checked the website again and the three I needed from Rockville were suddenly available (perhaps someone else had never picked up their order?) so I reordered them and took the kids to Rockville two days later to pick them up. I am very excited about them and hope they will look as awesome lit up as I am picturing them in my head! 

Gallery light from a 
customer's review.   

    Back to pendants. I revisited the question of what is the theme of my house--and the answer is "comfortable retreat." If I'm using a cool toned-sort of neutral wood for the cabinets and what I would call a kind of glam granite countertop, and I have these barstools that remind me of a comfortable clubhouse sort of look, then what sort of light fits, or as they say in The Big Lebowski, "really ties the room together?" I wanted something kind of vintage, so I ordered these two first:

The beachy light fixture. It was actually ice blue, not crisp white. 

The mercury glass light.

    The mercury glass light in person was not nearly as cool as the website. The paint was layered on too many times and it just looked dirty (I washed the glass to confirm that it wasn't just dirty). I was even able to hook it up to a plug-in pendant wire I had and see what it looked like lit, and I kept trying to like it but just didn't. The white one was actually sort of ice blue with hand-applied brown stripes that looked like they would match our wood tones well. I thought it had a sort of beachy vibe without being too beachy, but Josh didn't think it fit with the glam-factor of the countertops, and I agreed. I did more searching for pendants and showed four to Josh, and we decided to order two and see how we liked those:

The champagne parasol light fixture

The lotus light fixture

    We actually liked both, but considering the low ceilings and that the pendants would be hung kind of high, we didn't think you would get to see/appreciate the texture on the top of the lotus flower one very well, and while the parasol one wasn't magical, it felt like a solid, non-show-stealing selection that looked vintage, clean and had brass accents that would work with the gallery lights. Plus they were a steal at $63 on Amazon. Take that, ridiculous $775 pendant! 

    That leaves the chandelier for the dining room. I don't know why so many chandeliers are circular when most tables are rectangular. Our table is six feet long without a leaf, but we normally have a leaf in, making it seven feet long. A 24-inch diameter circle doesn't do much for the ends of the table. I kept searching rectangular chandeliers, but most of these are a "caged" style, where it literally looks like you are locking up your lights in a cage. (I know this sounds ridiculous; I am reminded of the Maggie Gyllenhaal in the movie Away We Go where she is a mother who refuses to use a stroller because "I love my babies, why would I want to PUSH them away from me?" That cracks me up every time I think of it.) Caged chandeliers are just not a look I like. 

      This looks like you are telling light bulbs to stay in their place.                              

    I did find this one that is linear and kind of Nordic, a style I like but don't really want to embody in this house, and I liked that it was 51" long but it also feels a little stark to me. 

Swedish, but not IKEAish.

    A lot of round chandeliers are either modern or too traditional, so I also started looking at boho styles. I've ordered this one, which Josh was not very pleased with the look of it on the internet but we'll see when we get it in person:

This sold out on three different websites at the same time. 
I'm hoping it lives up to its hype. 

    And I also like this one, but it's sort of small, I think I would want to get two of them and hang them over the table:

I call this one the "rattan asterisk."

Besides lighting, another decision was the kitchen sink. Our kitchen had a large stainless steel sink in a 36-inch cabinet. However, it was a divided sink, with a lot of wasted space between the two chambers, and it was quite shallow. I could fit most pots in it, but not my baking half sheets (let alone my full sheet, which spanned across both basins!), and we were always spilling water on the floor. Josh always says doing the dishes is his only contribution to the kitchen, so he was quite interested in what sink we would get. (Side note: while most of the kitchen design was to my specifications, I did let him have the win when it comes to putting the sink in the island even though I don't like this plan because then all your drying dishes are taking up island space and I hate having to dry things with a towel because evaporation is a thing that requires no human effort. Josh likes the sink in the island because then he can talk to people while doing dishes. So we compromised, and I'm putting the sink in the island and I will leave dishes for him to do while I sit in the bar stools and watch. If anyone wants to get us a housewarming gift, buy us dish towels that actually absorb water, because we will be needing them!) When we were at the kitchen supply store, a gigantic Kraus workstation sink caught our eye, and the staff said people love them. This is a very rectangular sink with a ledge on the long sides that perfectly holds a cutting board, a foldable drying mat, you can get a basket strainer that fits, and probably even more I don't know about yet. I quickly made note of the model they recommended, saved it on our Amazon list, then had second thoughts about it when the price went up in the spring and researched other brands and read reviews for all the companies, got nervous because there are negative reviews for EVERY brand, then saw the Kraus sink went back down in price and decided to get it. Even better, there was one on Amazon that was "used like new" for 35% off. I don't usually buy "used" things on Amazon, but it seemed pretty clear to me that this was a sink that had been opened and returned without being used, so we bought it! We opened it up and it looks fine except a little bit of not-straightness in the undermount part of the metal, which seems like it will be fine. So that decision is done!

Behold, the super functional workstation sink.

    We still need to pick out a faucet, but that feels like less of a big deal. People keep asking what type of metal our cabinet pulls will be and I'm thinking champagne bronze but I want to see the cabinets first. And I won't have to wait for much longer, they are coming in next week!