Lighting Makes The Room

It isn't the plastic surgery or the make-up that makes celebrities look fabulous in photos--it's the lighting. The same is true for rooms. We found very little hard wired lighting in our new home. The living room had no lighting whatsoever and the family room had only eyeball spots over the fireplace. One of the bedrooms also did not have any lighting.

Whenever you want recessed fixtures in the ceiling or any other hard wired fixtures in the ceiling or on the walls you are going to have to tear up some sheetrock. The wiring for the fixture and the switches necessary to turn them on have to get to each other and back to your breaker box somehow and this usually requires drilling some holes through studs or ceiling joists--most definitely if you are doing this work on a first floor. You can usually avoid cutting holes in your walls if you have attic access to the room and the breaker box, but not always. That is why it is a good idea to plan your lighting early in the process so you can repair the walls before you do any finish work in the room.

We aligned the four new recessed fixtures with the existing eyeball spots.

The additional lighting gave the room a nice glow. We put the new lights on a separate switch so we could elect to have just the spots on if we wanted.

The electrician came to do the work before the crown molding was put in, so he put the holes in the walls that he needed right up close to the ceiling so that the crown would cover it up and we didn't need to do any repair work. He was able to do the same thing in the living room where we were installing the coffered ceiling, so unfortunately we did have to patch an area on the wall where he needed access. No worries though, we were repainting that room anyway, so it was the perfect time to cut a hole in the wall.

We centered the recessed fixtures in each of the four corner boxes in the ceiling. We had air conditioning vents in two of them, but thankfully we were still able to center those can lights. The room has a great feel with this lighting.

We also put a center fixture in the living room. 8' ceilings do not allow for very low fixtures, unless over a table, but semi-flush fixtures give you the depth without too much height. I thought the Tiffany look was fun and the colors went with the palette I selected for the room.

Here you can see more of the ceiling.

Another best practice in lighting is layering. Plan to have ceiling lights and lamps that are all controlled separately. Another must is dimmers. It is rare that we do not have dimmer switches on our lighting. Some types of lights cannot be dimmed, but those should be selected only for task lighting. We are fond of Lutron switches. They have programmable dimmers, so you can set the dim level and every time you turn the light on it is at that pre-set level. You can easily change it on the fly and either set it to a new level or go back to where you had it. Another fun feature of Lutron is that they dim up to the level and down to off, rather than just coming on and turning off all at once. Makes for a beautiful presentation in public rooms. We just use the simple slide dimmers in our private rooms. Examples of Lutron dimmers are below.

Now that we were done with our electrical work and the rooms were beginning to come together, we started to work on one room at a time to finish them out. I was really impatient about that pink paint, which as you can see is still there. Next post I'll talk about our interesting ceiling treatment in the dining room and finishing out that room. I think this blog is accurately demonstrating how long it takes to get the foundational work done before any rooms can be finished without fear of damage. I'll bet you are like me and ready to see something done! Next post I will have finished photos of the dining room.

Details Matter

When you suffer from renovationism one of the more positive side effects is attention to detail. This probably also stems from my education in graphic design and early career as an art director. I do obsess over the details in our renovation projects. This is one of the reasons I do my own caulking and painting. I'm pretty picky. One of the early details we needed to determine since we knew we would renovate this entire house was the trim molding. The house had none. We decided we wanted the home to look like it was older than it was by using older molding styles. And we wanted a consistent molding throughout our home so it would look like it was all built that way in the first place. We got as much of that work done before we moved in as possible and then just kept moving things (mostly boxes) around while we continued to work. Here is a series of photos of the work in progress:

We selected a wide, but simple, door casing. There was no door casing at all here originally, just drywall wrapped around the doorway opening.

We also selected really tall base molding and put garage stop instead of quarter round. This height matched the height of the baseboard heating units and really helped those to blend in more.

The crown molding we selected was also bigger than typical and had a very simple cove shape. You can see here that crown was put in before the door casings were added.

Another feature we really liked from our old house was the coffered ceiling in the living room. I saw no reason not to repeat a design choice we made before and liked. Here it is going in. You can see the structure of this. You have to select how many squares you want in the room and which direction the full-length beams will go. The beams in the other direction go in between those full-length beams. We designed this ceiling with nine squares so we got good sized squares and had one in the middle of the ceiling, which would allow for a center fixture.

The nine square design also worked well in conjunction with the bay window.

Once the beams are done, the molding along the walls goes in to match the height of the beams.

The final step is to put small crown molding inside each square. The type I selected did not come in primed wood. Bummer. I had to prime all these myself.

The molding work was really starting to come together and the room is beginning to take shape.

This is the other side of the doorway into the living room.

And, the doorway to the dining room was also just drywall, so now it matches the doorway to the living room.

All this work going on an once was difficult to live with. But, you can see all that pink paint. I had to get all the trim work done before I could start painting walls. That was the motivation that kept me caulking and painting every night until midnight for months.

Trim work isn't the only detail that matters. Next I'll show some of the early lighting decisions we made to ensure we weren't tearing up any finished trim or wall work.