Well HEY! Hope you had a great weekend! We did a lot of bumming around and being productive – a little of both extremes. :)
Tonight’s before and after is brought to you by the continued science fair that is our kitchen. I showed you the mess the water damage has created, and last Friday, the madness continued.
We had noticed a few weeks ago that the framing around our back door was rotting away. We thought it would be a quick fix, and our handyman did too. That is until he started removing trim and found massive amounts of water damage – separate from the mess in the rest of the kitchen:
That’s a hole in our kitchen floor. For a brief moment in time we had a fabulous source of natural light in the basement. ;) I try to look at the bright side.
I told him to just tear out the floors cause they were going anyway -- thank GOODNESS we discovered this before replacing the floors!! (And no, there’s still no movement on that – hopefully this week.)
The folks who built our deck made it too high – so for six years the water has been flowing into the door frame every time it rained. That eventually ate away at the trim, the subfloor and the threshold.
Anyhoo, our awesome handyman worked from 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. and got it fixed up and did a few little changes that will keep this from happening again. LOVE HIM.
So…there’s been a little change I’ve been wanting to make to the kitchen for a while now, and this weekend I decided to do it. Because I needed to do something to the space that would make me feel in control again.
Or maybe I just wanted a pretty new light. Who knows. ;)
Recently something has been bugging me about light over the kitchen table:
I love it! But it felt too light…I don’t know, just not substantial enough. Once I realized what it was that was buggin’ me, I couldn’t get it out of my head. I just wanted something that was a bit more dramatic to fill that “space” in the room.
Enter the Portfolio light from Lowes:
I think it was $140? It was LUUURVE at first sight. I think I gasped just a bit when I saw it in the store, cause I knew it would look so good over our table.
I installed it the other night (with very little daylight to spare – I forget the sun sets so much earlier already!) and I couldn’t be happier with it:
It adds a little contemporary flare to the space:
I love it combined with our antique claw foot table. :)
I think what I love most is that it sends all of the light down to the table – it is SO much brighter under there now:
And of course I have it on a dimmer switch so it looks fab down low or up high. I love it!!
I thought about spraying it black for about two hot seconds, but I think we have enough black going on. (And at night it looks black anyway.) I’m working on some ways to bring some more color into this side of the kitchen, but for now, I love how this has changed it up a bit:
And look how calm our kitchen looks from this side (although you can see where I covered the torn out flooring by the door with the rug).
This side tells the real story of the past week:
This is what happens when your pile spot (your island) is in the office. ;)
So here’s my before and after for this month –- the previous chandelier on the left, the new pendant on the right:
Typically your fixture should hang about 28 to 32 inches above your table and I always end up cutting my wires too short when I install. ALWAYS. This one hangs 32 above the table, which I’m now happy about because any lower would have been directly in the eye line (for me anyway). As it is we can see under it well.
I found an old photo of the light after I installed it last year and it’s fun to see the changes since then:
Including the addition of a cute (rascally) dog. ;) And the removal of a floor. Gah.
So let’s see your projects! Link them UP!
I’d appreciate it GREATLY if you could link back to this post or at least my blog in your post. You can use this button if you’d like:
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