Afterthought

No matter how long or how often you do renovation projects, you don't always do everything right the first time. Sometimes you miss something. Or, you thought about it and decided against it for some reason that doesn't make sense to you later. Such was the case with the laundry room. After about of year of using it we determined that we really needed a light over the sink.

Seems like such common sense now, but I remember considering it and then dismissing it back when we were constructing the room. The room was made out of half of a hallway and two back-to-back closets. Both the hallway and one closet had overhead fixtures and we kept those, just changed out the actual fixtures. It almost seemed like overkill to have two lights in that small room. So, it just didn't seem necessary to have a light over the sink. It is ridiculous to me now that I thought about it that way.

So, we recently added the light over the sink. The ceiling joists didn't allow for a recessed fixture, which was our first idea. So, we went with a hanging fixture. Then, we had an outlet to the left of the sink, but the electrician didn't feel comfortable trying to add the wire in such a tight space with the glass tile that was around it. His solution was to put the switch at the door where the switch for the overhead lights was. But, I knew that would never work. When you are at the sink you want to reach over and turn on the light, not turn around and go back to the door to do it. So, we made a two-gang box where the old outlet was and this required that we tear out some of the glass tile and patch it. It was a bit of work on our part, but worth it and we had all of the extra tile and grout that we needed to do the job.

Here is how this turned out:

Getting a small, but very bright, incandescent hanging fixture proved difficult. But we found this one and it works great.

And you can't even tell that we tore out tiles and patched it.

The moral of this story is really think through what you need and want in the space and just do it. It never works as well to rethink it later and change things. And, even if it works as well, it is usually more expensive and more difficult.