Project - Undercabinet Lighting

Just prior to October I realized I had used but only one day of vacation. Stumbling to figure out how to use the remaining days I came up with the idea to take off every other Friday. You know what? It turns out that it was a great idea! This is the third of such days and I put it to good use.

As with all Free Fridays, as I will now officially start calling it, I begin by going to Lowes. It is from wandering the aisles for 15-20 minutes that I begin to get an idea on how to fill my day with inexpensive projects. The theme for the day turned out to be lighting.

I first picked up a set of undercounter puck lights. I have used these Xenon lights before and aside from their inefficient heat output, I'm quite pleased with their performance. If you buy the 6-pack ($35) the kit upgrades the cord switch to a touch pad with 3 dimming settings. The kit is intended for surface mounted applications and comes with plenty of wire to set up a simple layout. To bridge the gap over the sink however, I had to use some additional cord from my stash. We still havent addressed the ugly curtain sink thing.



You had to assemble the individual light cords by putting the plugs on the ends. This allowed me to pull the cords through various cabinets drilling only small holes BEFORE I put the plugs on. For the most part I ran the cords on the inside corner of the cabinet just behind the cabinet face adjacent to the door knobs. This hid the cabeling perfectly. Even when you are looking for it, it remains hidden. I spent about 1/3rd of the time just thinking through how I was going to lay out the system. I decided upon placing the touch pad control just next to the sink area. Blended in farily well.

Here you can see that the puck light installation can be very clean, especially if you have enough of a lip around the bottom of the cabinets.



Not too shabby.