With the kitchen painted, it was time to move on to the lighting in the room. As you can see in the "before," the entire kitchen was lit with a single 60-watt light bulb.



Yep, that was the only light in the kitchen. Look carefully at the back corner of the countertops and you'll see a severe lack of brightness, which made using sharp knifes a kind of interesting carnival game.

To add additional light to the kitchen and save or fingers from a horrificly painful accident in the future, we decided to add a set of four six-inch recess lights above the fridge, stove, and sink. To make the job easy, I'd recommend you do what I did and marry into a family with a couple of professional electricians. Alternatively, you can blackmail one. They did all the hard work, such as cutting holes in the ceiling, running the wire up in the attic, and installing the lights, while I deftly managed the broom.



It's harder than it looks, trust me.

After they carefully measured where the lights were going in the ceiling, they simply traced out a circle using the light casing and cut out a hole using a sawzall. The next step was to head up in the attic to run the wite and install the casings*. Finally, they installed a new dimmer switch and hooked it up to the new recess lights. With a couple of professionals, the lights went up about an hour and were simple to put in (which is easy for me to say). Four 60-watt light bulbs later and here is the finished product.



Total cost: Light casings and trim: $90, Wire: $10, Labor: free (suckers)

*Our house was built in 1972. At the time in this area, if you decided to go with electric heat for your house, the electric company would come in and blow a whole bunch of insalation in your attic for free (as I understand it, I could be wrong since I wasn't around in 1972). Anyway, our attic contains about 3 feet of 35-year old blown insalation that has combined with dust, dead bugs, and a host of other stuff that makes you want to dry heave. My brother-in-laws were none to happy to have to crawl through that to install the lights and they won't let me forget it.