I learned from watching Devine Design with Candice Olson in the early 2000s that lighting is a really important consideration when designing a room. When we redid our first kitchen, we gave under cabinet lighting a shot. I’m hooked. When building our current house, we did a few lighting upgrades, as well. We again paid extra for under cabinet lighting even though we didn’t upgrade really anything else in the kitchen. We have vinyl flooring, laminate counters, and the most basic faucet. I’m happy with our decision to use our money for the under cabinet lighting. Everything else can be switched out easier than that AND it really makes a difference in making the kitchen a brighter space since there aren’t any windows in the actual kitchen (they are in the breakfast nook) and we have dark cabinets. We also opted to find our own lighting for all of our main rooms (eat-in kitchen, dining, great room, sunroom, foyer) rather than pick from what the builder offered. I am also glad we did this. I think you get a lot of bang for your buck with nice lighting. The whole house just feels nicer and more updated. Unfortunately, I do think we made the wrong decision for our great room, but we can change that eventually. It just seems too small for the space.

When renovating our office into a mudroom, lighting was one of the hardest decisions we had to make! There are SO many options. Like endless. Lighting can also be SUPER expensive. I knew I wanted barn lights over the desk and a central ceiling fixture where we already had a builder grade boob light. Picking that out was the hardest. Everything I liked was super expensive. This forced us to be creative. We chose this light for the main fixture.

I think we got the 14″ globe for around $150 on sale. However, there is only one bulb (we bought this fun bulb), so we decided to put lighting over each locker. We loved the look of a lot of the options from Schoolhouse Electric, but they were all way too expensive since we needed 4 of them. It would defeat the purpose of going with the cheaper ceiling fixture. Here are a few that we considered (or close to those we considered):

We liked that all of these were simple, could go along with the black in the other fixtures we had picked out, and could go along with a modern farmhouse vibe. The price just wasn’t going to work for us. So Parker started playing around with other options and came up with this combination:

What do you think?? I think they are even better than the options at Schoolhouse Electric. They are a little more refined and less industrial than the bare bulb options, which I think is a good thing. I also like that the globe points down rather than up. I think they work perfectly with the other lights. AND the total for all four was about $30 less than buying one from Schoolhouse. If that’s not a win, I don’t know what is! 🙂 (Don’t get me wrong, Schoolhouse Electric lights are awesome and were clearly inspiring. I will continue to look there when we have lighting needs. Someday hopefully we can splurge on something.)

While it definitely took time and effort and a little trial and error, it was definitely worth it. I am very glad that we have three lighting groups in the room and all can be turned on separately. I think this was way better than splurging on a central light and foregoing the locker lights (I bet Candice would agree 🙂 ). I just really don’t think the lighting in the room could have turned out better. I hope it inspires you to think outside the box the next time you don’t have the money or don’t want to spend the money on something you like for your home. I have even more lighting hack ideas that I hope to execute in the future (one in particular for our little boy’s room). Please let me know what you think of our lighting hack! Any lights out there you love but don’t want to splurge on?? Maybe we can brainstorm!

Jalene

*Disclaimer: We did this about a year ago and my links are from today, so I am not 100% positive that the base and globe from my links will fit together. Things could have changed in the last year.