I met with Alex this morning to go over my lighting plan. If you've never done one, it's a map showing where you want your lights to go and indicating, with dotted lines, where those lights should have switches located. You also indicate where outlets should go. When I was a renovation newbee on my first kitchen, I neglected to do this and I ended up with a gorgeous kitchen that was not well-lit. I also ended up with cutouts for outlets interrupting the flow of my expensive slate backsplash. This time I was prepared.
I did a lot of reading about lights: warmth, lumens, lamps. To create my map I took a screenshot of my floorplan and doodled all over it, then created a "key," so that my electrician could understand where everything is going.
It’s a good thing that I did all that noodling around last week in design tools, stressing about my lights because this was final call — and I’m going with the pendants.
They’re beautiful, and they were a custom splurge that can’t be returned so hopefully I'll love them as much when they're not situated over my dream island — because the lighting plan is set in stone now. All I need to do is pick up four additional recessed lights on my lunch hour today.
The electrician came in as I was leaving so I waited to hear Alex walk him through yesterday’s discussion with the co-op's electrician Harry.
In short, the situation is this: There are two lines coming up from the basement. When this building was built in 1946 there was only one, as buildings then were wired for 110v, standard for the era. Sometime a few decades ago the co-op brought up a second line for all units to get them up to 220v, mostly to run air conditioners. The first line went into the original fuse box (that my seller's electrician turned into an illegal junction box) and the second line went into the breaker panel. Aleks’ electrician now needs to make sure both lines run into the breaker box. And no, sadly, there’s no extra power being bestowed on my unit—for all my expense and trouble.
In other news, we were expecting the delivery today of the IKEA cabinets. But Aleks texted me at 5:00 to say they’d never arrived. When I got home I called XPO, their delivery service and got put on hold indefinitely. I hung up and dialed IKEA and finally got a human. She looked up the history and said she could see it in XPO's warehouse, so it wasn’t lost at least.
I was hangry and in a bad mood — I demanded an IKEA gift card for my trouble. The lady said she’d indicate my request in the system.
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