Masters of the House

I couldn't give you any full shots of the kitchen with its new swanky painted cabinetry, because I haven't shared another sneaky project with you!

The lighting!

To date, the room has had just a single fluorescent rod on the ceiling. And let's face it. That's not particularly attractive now, is it?

So I've been dreaming of pendants. For quite a while now, actually!

I've been dreaming of this pendant for $104.95 from Wayfair.com ...

And this pendant for $107.95 from Wayfair.com ...
 

And this pendant for $131.95 from Wayfair.com ...

Pretty, aren't they? And pretty pricey when you start thinking about buying several of them!

But then, in having a sticky beak on the website of the fairly new competition to Bunnings in Australia, Masters, I found this guy!

Sure, he's not quite as shiny as the others, but I'm not shine-ist! See what I did there?

And his price tag is $39.97. Much better, thank you very much!

But then I had to decide exactly where he was going to go! So I did me some photoshopping. Note that this was pre-kitchen-cabinet-painting and pre-rangehood-hanging, so I photoshopped the rangehood in too.

So one option was to hang two pendants in front of the windows either side of the rangehood. The other was to hang them above the peninsula. But the moment I saw the peninsula-hanging option I was quite certain that was not going to happen. Too messy and non-symmetrical, don't you think?

So option one it was. And the right option it was indeed!

Aren't they just beeeyuuuutiful?

And we even bought a third one to pop in front of the window above the kitchen sink (which you can see I've spent a bit of time paint scraping lately, as well)!

And then to solve the problem of there being no light above the peninsula!
Because we didn't want to get involved in that busy non-symmetrical-ness that I experimented with above, these lights would have to be wall lights that we could conceal above the beam above the peninsula.

What to do... what to do...

IKEA!

Enter the HEKTAR wall lamp. It played nicely with our Masters pendants, but we could slot two of them in just high enough that they wouldn't interrupt the view to the pendants. And it was $19.99. Who can argue with that?

Tom hopped up and installed them (without any live electrical wires, we saved that part for the electrician)

Not too shabby, huh?

If I were a good blogger I would have taken a shot from the other direction to show that you can't really see the bottoms of those lights underneath that beam when you look toward the kitchen. But clearly I'm not. So you'll just have to take my word for it. What can I say? We're madly rushing to get this house done in time to move to our new one!

So how about a few more kitchen-painted and pendants-installed shots? Sigh. Isn't my kitchen just the most beautiful kitchen ever in the world? Don't answer that if your answer isn't a resounding YES!

We also replaced the off-centre strip fluro in the ceiling with a ceiling fan with a light. A slightly unconventional choice for a kitchen light, but we find that the kitchen gets quite warm, so a fan certainly doesn't go astray. And we'll get the electrician to move it so that it is centred off the rangehood soon. And of course patch that nasty un-painted section of the ceiling that removing the fluro left!!

So what do you think? Most beautiful kitchen ever, right?