Renovation Diaries: Let there be light

It's 12 days to move-in and we're in the home stretch now-- the kitchen cabinets have been installed and the floors are done, the walls are being painted as we speak, and next up will be the toilet fixtures. The last big things to be installed after are the lights. They were also the last things we shopped for because Jude was away-- lighting is important to us and I wasn't about to make those decisions alone.

Our lights shopping technically began while Jude was away-- Restoration Hardware was having an incredible online lighting sale in July and we thought we'll get the lights delivered to our friends' where Jude was staying and he'll bring them home with him. He could only carry so much so we limited ourselves to just lights for the kitchen and dining. Our first purchase was this clear glass cloche pendant light. It uses gorgeous Edison-style filament bulbs and if one could fall in love with a bulb, I did when I saw this. The lamp isn't very large so we bought 3 for the dining nook.

And for the kitchen, this aged steel/aluminum piece. The kitchen ceilings will be painted a dark gray and we thought this would be a nice complement.

In the end though, because of the very careful (read: bulky) packaging, we had to ship these lights back via DHL. Between the dismal baggage allocation and the bulkiness of the boxes, there was just no way they could have made it on the plane with Jude.

We finished up the light shopping last week in Balestier Road with two hanging lamps for the living room. For our entryway/ front of the living room, this Tom Dixon-esque pendant (read: replica). I love how sculptural it looks and the fact that it kind of reminds of a brass cooking pot or some kind of water vessel :)

We also really like the blown-glass pendants from Niche Modern but the prices are waaaaaay out of our league (actually, the league of all mere mortals, if you ask me...).

Thankfully, we were able to find something very similar at Form + Light Concepts for a fraction of a fraction of the original price (think less than 10%!!)

The rest of the lights in the house (bedrooms and bathrooms) are just simple ceiling lights with acrylic covers. We'll get desk lamps and a bedside lamp for Sophie once we've moved in and have a better sense of where things go and what we need. We're probably going to eschew conventional bedside lamps in our bedroom mostly because it's a small space and we may not even be getting bedside tables large enough for lamps. Right now, we're thinking of stools for the bedside (just enough for our glasses and reading material) and clip-on reading lamps from a shallow shelf we'll have above the bed. Something like this:

The coming week will be a big one-- I'm just going to assume that everything will miraculously fall into place while we're not looking and that when we see the flat next, it will look more like home and less a construction site in transition...