We Saw the Light

Wow, did we ever see the light a couple of days ago!  I mean literally, we saw the light.  Tons and tons of lights, actually.  We had our lighting fixtures selection and holy smokes were there a lot of lights!

I could have spent all day in this place.  I mean, look how pretty!  Pretty, pretty, pretty lights!

Michele (spelled just the same way I spell my middle name--Michele--with one "l". Must have been light selection destiny!) was our interior light selection designer.  At any rate, when we arrived, she introduced herself, then asked if we had our floor plans.  Um, what?! Floor plans? We had no idea what she was talking about.  She said our builders hadn't given her our floor plans so she didn't know what lights we should be looking for.  This seemed oddly reminiscent of this post here. 

I actually had a copy of the floor plans in my email so I quick pulled it up on my phone and emailed it to Michele.

Thankfully, she was able to print off the plans so we could get started.  Otherwise, we possibly would have had to scrap the appointment.  Grrr to our builder for yet again not being organized, prepared and for failing to communicate with us or the subcontractors.

Anyway, luckily we were able to jump right in with exterior selections. I don't care for the exposed light bulb look (just not my thing) and we knew we wanted something that mimicked the lines of the exterior of the house, as well as something that was in our price range.  That left us with about 3 options, which made it easy. So we decided on something very similar to these for the exterior:

 We'll also have some recessed lights on the front porch area in addition to the light fixtures like above for the garage area. Yay for recessed lights on the front porch!

Then we moved onto the really fun stuff--dining and pendants! There are some unbelievably gorgeous fixtures out there for these areas. We decided we wanted the oil-rubbed bronze finish since the door handles will also have this finish.  Also, since most everything in the house will be white or light, we felt like we needed something a little darker to anchor the rooms.  Kind of like this:

Sort of like that--couldn't find an exact image, but it gives you a basic idea.  We chose these pendants

which are hard to see because of this super, duper bad photo (dang hard to take pics in a room full of light fixtures and a black ceiling).  The pendants are kind of gold with a really warm, amber-colored light.  Cannot wait to have these beauties hanging up!

We simultaneously chose the dining room fixture so it would coordinate with the pendants.  Again, we pretty much knew what we wanted--something oil-rubbed bronzed and something more rectangular in shape since that's the shape of the dining area.  We ended up with this.

Now I know it's hard to tell from the above photo, but this has really clean lines and is very simple while still being pretty visually interesting.  That's totally my style.  Here's a little better photo of this same fixture from the catalog

See how pretty? Cannot wait to see that piece of jewelry hanging up!  We also chose a coordinating hanging light for over the staircase and something fun for the foyer, but I neglected to take photos of those.

Next up were the bathrooms.  Nothing super exciting there, but this is almost what will be in our master bath.

Again, not a great photo, but you get the idea.  Oil-rubbed bronze again with those same clean, simple lines.  Our fixtures will have 3 lights instead of 2 and there will be 2 sets of these in the master bath--one over each sink.  Have I mentioned yet Eric and I each get our own sink? Doing a happy dance about that!


We finished up with some less exciting lighting decisions--closets, mudroom, and ceiling fans.  However, on our way out we found these light fixtures pretty entertaining!

Can't go wrong with a little chandelier bling!

Or a giant disco ball!

Of course, we'd never actually have any of these fixtures in our house, but I know a 7-year-old little girl who might want something like this hanging in her room!

The giant disco ball changes color! This would be Marea's favorite!

And that wraps up our lighting selection, and actually almost all of our selections.  Amazing to think we'll be in our home on the Lane in just under a month!