Under Cabinet Lighting

I've always been interested in adding under cabinet lighting to our kitchen cabinets. I think it looks nice, and with our floor plan I thought it would be nice to add a little more light without having to just leave on the kitchen lights...too harsh for night time movie watching. :) The trouble with under cabinet lighting though, is it's expensive. I'd seen several different options or kits but they were all in the $100 range and I just wasn't interested in spending that much. Enter Ikea. I was there browsing one day and came across this:

The best part? This light set was $30! I knew it would take a little bit more effort to set up since it wasn't meant for cabinets but I thought it was worth a try for the price.

The lights are actually pretty cool. You can customize how you connect them which allows you to fit them to your designated area (a gal I encountered at the store actually used the lights behind her TV). There are these connector pieces that you use to lengthen your row of lights and then they all hook to this hub looking thing for power. (Sorry about the pictures, Loren actually did most of the work while I was gone one day but was sweet enough to snap some cell phone pics for me to share)

We laid out the lights on the counter before attaching them to the cabinets just so we could mess with the sizing without having to remove the adhesive every time. The actual installation is really simple, there's little sticky pads on the back of the lights so you just peel and stick. The cords were a bit trickier. I ended up slicing some 3M strips to match the width of the cords and using that. At first I just used a few pieces and after awhile the cords started to sag, but I added more so basically the entire cord was supported by 3M strip and it seems to be holding up well. There's a few strategically placed thumb tacks keeping the cords in place too.

You like those blue paint leftovers?! The kitchen was a lovely baby blue color when we moved in so I don't know when that bright primary blue color was used. Anyway, this is the hub that you connect all the light stick pieces into for power. I think I mentioned before that there are extension pieces in the light set so it's pretty easy in a relatively small space to get all your lights connected.

The hub (as I call it) attaches to the power cord, and to power the lights our wonky cupboards actually came in handy. Since we don't have an actual corner cabinet, there's open space in that area. So we just plugged the lights in at the nearest outlet and tucked the switch up into the cupboard. Yeah, we have to open the cabinet door to turn the lights on and off but it's really not that big of a deal for us. Especially considering how much money we saved using this little cheapo set.

I love the nice glow it adds to the kitchen. At night when we're in the living room area we can just leave the under cabinet lights and sink light on and it's perfect.

Does anyone else have cabinet lighting? I love it and wish we would've installed it years ago! Let me know what you think in the comments! xoxo, K