Hiding Kitchen Lighting
Perhaps your kitchen is already so cluttered, adding one more decorative element could push the room over the top. Or your design sensibilities may be such that you’d rather not see a ho-hum globe, fixture or bulb amid your world of pots and pans.
Problem identified. But don’t dismiss this serious issue: If you don’t provide enough illumination, you or any other cook in the house could wind up with a nasty cut or worse. The secret is to hide lights in plain sight, using clever tactics to cover all lighting bases.
1. Install light bars designed to contour to the underside of your cabinets. Use double-mount tape to secure the prefabricated units to the cabinet bottoms or screws that are long enough to thread into the wood but not so long that they protrude through the cabinets.
Add a strip of wood that’s stained or painted to match the cabinet finish if, after the light bars are installed, you can spot any of them.
2. Mount interior lights in the kitchen cabinets if your door fronts have glass inserts. This will allow light to spill from the cabinets into the kitchen.
Use a drill to create a wiring channel from cabinet to cabinet if you’re a do-it-yourselfer, and then mount a series of small fixtures manufactured for interior cabinet illumination at discreet locations in the cabinets. Make sure that your plates, cups and serving pieces don’t obstruct the lights.
3. Replace your ceiling fixture with string lights wrapped around a hanging pot rack. Remove your ceiling fixture, and replace the stationary socket with a string of lights. Hang a pot rack from the spot where you had your ceiling fixture. Continue reading