a light

Around this time last year,
Chris & I were milling around the idea of giving our kitchen a face lift.
In hindsight, maybe we should have been concentrating more on our upstairs,
but, hey, its getting done now and I've been promised it will be complete well
before baby arrives, so no harm, no foul there.

So.. there we were, contemplating everything from flooring to paint colors when
we realized that there was something that we could do immediately to better the
kitchen.....We could take down the set of cabinets above our island that had caused
many a bruised noggin and many more crouched down conversations, since we are
both fairly tall and didn't much feel like talking into oak cabinet doors.

By immediately, I mean we talked about doing it for a couple months
before our good friend Matt decided to take matters into his own hands one night
while visiting. With the help of his brother, Ben, and Chris they got out our trusty,
yellow DeWalt power tools and went to work. Within the hour the cabinets were
down and the kitchen felt so open and new. The wire that once connected to the
cabinet light got wrapped up and taped and we thought that we'd better get on
putting something there before somebody got shocked.

the night cabinets came down

On Wednesday, that light was put in place and the switch was flipped on and we
heard the same "Hallelujah!" song that Clark Griswold heard in the Christmas Vacation
movie when his whole block lit up.

The light was a collaboration between Chris & I. The first idea I had was to make some
sort of industrial, pipe light using blue tinted mason jars. We were all gungho about it until
I saw similar ideas for sale on Pottery Barn's website. We wanted something unique hanging
from our ceiling beam, not something that could be mistaken for a mass-produced, overpriced
light fixture.

So one day, while looking for bathroom lights online, I came across an Edison lightbulb and
the old squirrel cage got to turning. Before I knew it, we were scouring every hardware store,
plumbing outlet, and home improvement store in the area looking for black oil pipe, which I'm
told is or was used at one point for plumbing.  After many trips to town and back and many
napkin sketches, we had all of the main pieces we needed.

The problem now was finding a way to get lightbulbs to screw into the fixture, and that, my friends
is where my involvement in the project came to a close. Electrical accessories and wiring are not
my forte, so they became Chris's. So after a lot of trial and error and even more trips down and back
to pick up the correct size washers, we got the thing figured out and our electrician came out Wednesday, wire the thing up complete with a fancy-schmancy dimmer switch, and there was light!