Getting the lighting right in the kitchen is almost like a science; if even one dimmer switch is off, you may miss an entire grease spill on the countertops when you did your last wipe down.

When you set the mail down on that grease spot you couldn’t see, ruining a holiday greeting card, all the sudden you may feel annoyed just being in the kitchen. It’s like you can never get it clean, so it always feels dirty, even if it’s not. How can you revamp the kitchen to make it feel like a warm, happy place to make food and share in a good meal if it has instead started to feel gross and dirty?

Updating the Kitchen: A Quick Overview

You don’t have to spend thousands of dollars to renovate your kitchen. If you’re on a tight budget but are desperately seeking a kitchen redesign, you would be amazed what a little paint, hardware and good lighting can do to transform a space, especially in the kitchen.

HGTV suggests that if you’re updating your kitchen, you should “start by updating the color and reducing clutter; then add new hardware [and] fixtures.” When painting the kitchen, you might want to give it a splash in your favorite color, but try to refrain from painting it in fire engine red. HouseLogic tells kitchen fixer-uppers to paint the kitchen using a neutral palette, such as in shades of gray, beige or white. You can add vibrant colors to the space through your choice of hardware and light fixtures, let’s take a look at how.

In an interview with HGTV, president of the National Kitchen & Bath Association Nikki Trivisonno said that the style of hardware in the kitchen has an effect on the overall look of the space. If the hardware is outdated, the kitchen will look outdated as well.

Don’t stop with replacing the hardware either. Like we discussed at the beginning of this article, kitchen lighting can have a negative effect on the space. If it’s too dim, too warm or too bright, the kitchen will never feel right, as it were. The kitchen will continue to feel dreary, outdated and unclean. A surefire way to enliven the space is replacing some of the overhead lights with kitchen island pendant lighting.

More on Kitchen Lighting

If you do most the meal prep work at the kitchen island, you need a lighting source that will help you to see if you’ve successfully removed all the bones from the fish, measured the flour evenly or cleaned up the olive oil spill sufficiently. Pendant lights, when measured properly for hanging distance between floor and ceiling, bask the room in light. For a spotlight effect and to better highlight the food you’re preparing, the lower the pendant light hangs, the better spotlight it creates. The kitchen should already have an overhead lighting system, be it track lighting or inset. The purpose of the pendant light is to perform as a task light to help you use the kitchen as it was intended: for cooking and entertaining.

What do I mean by entertaining? Pendant lights come in a variety of shapes, colors and styles. This is where you can bring in your favorite colors to really make the kitchen pop. The shade of the pendant light, be it glass, canvas, ceramic or some other can have a dramatic effect on the overall look of the kitchen, as with the number of pendant lights hanging from the ceiling. You can have one large drum pendant or three to four small to medium-sized pendants, it depends on the style of the pendant light and the look you’re going for.

What you should glean from this article is that a kitchen island needs good pendant lighting, otherwise it’s just another unused countertop speckled with old food crumbs.