The kitchen saga continues ...

It all started with a leak in the bathroom above the kitchen. After we fixed that, it was new floors in the kitchen and living room, and then refinishing the cabinets. The only thing left to do was to close the hole in the ceiling, and hang the new ceiling fan. Well, I guess we just don’t know when to quit.

I’ve always wanted under-cabinet lighting in the kitchen, and after having lived with overhead track lighting since we moved in, I was even more determined to improve the lighting situation in the kitchen. The main problem with the track lighting, besides the fact that it was older, gigantic, and not very attractive, was that it just wasn’t functional as task lighting. The light hit me in the back of the head and casted a shadow onto the counter top—nearly the exact opposite of what one would want from task lighting.

There are plenty of under-cabinet lighting kits out there that you can just plug into an existing wall outlet and then daisy chain together. If you don’t want to cut any holes in your walls, this is probably the way to go.

As you may have guessed, I’m pretty obsessive about such things. I didn’t want to see any cords, and I wanted to be able to control the lights from an existing switch near the kitchen sink. Also, conveniently, we already have a nice access hole in the ceiling. So, I decided to try to hide the wiring by running it in the ceiling and behind the walls.

My first plan was to fish the wiring down through the soffet, down the wall behind the cabinets, and then drill holes in the apron at the rear of the cabinets. That failed miserably when, after drilling two holes and hitting solid wood inside the wall, I discovered some manner of horizontal beam, probably either a fireblock or cabinet support of some sort, running the full length of the longest kitchen wall. I had used a stud detector to find the vertical wall studs, but, as luck would have it, I had managed to test above or below the horizontal beam in every case.

It was on to plan B, which was to drill holes through the top and bottom of the cabinets in some inconspicuous spot, and pull the wires down through to the underside of the cabinets. After pondering several not-so-inconspicuous spots at the back of the cabinets (I’m obsessive, remember), I decided to pull the wires down the front of the cabinets, just behind the facing.

After drilling some holes with a regular 1/2 in. bit in the tops of the cabinets and learning that the soffet is closed on top (inside the ceiling) with drywall, out came the 16 x 1/2 in. auger bit to drill all the way up through the cabinets and soffet at the top. It was a little scary drilling with a huge auger into places in the soffet where I could not see, but all went without incident. It was surprisingly easy to fish the wires, and soon I had them all pulled from the new junction box location through the tops of the cabinets and down the facings.

Now, all you electricians and kitchen designers out there are probably saying “Duh, everyone knows you can hide under-cabinet wiring like that”, but I am neither, and so I’m quite pleased about having come up with this, and about how it turned out.

I know that, as usual, I’m probably jinxing myself, but I think that was the hard part, and that mounting the lights and connecting the wires will be a simple matter. Stay tuned.

Tags: House