Since moving into our house in March of 2003, we have been living in relative darkness – in our living room, that is. The only installed lights in the room are three can lights over the fireplace at the far end of the room. We’ve added lamps, but they really didn’t do much to light the room, just give enough light from which one could read.

We’ve painted the walls lighter colors, which helped a bit. However, when we added on the sunroom to the back of the house, it covered the one large window of the living room – thus blocking out even more sunlight. The room was getting darker and we didn’t like it.

We discussed having an electrician install more can lights throughout the ceiling – that would surely get more light in the room. However, this was an obviously expensive option. We thought about painting all of the decorative wood paneling in the room white so that could brighten the room up; this was an unpopular option.

Finally, we wished out loud about how nice it would be if the ceiling fan in the middle of the ceiling had a light on it. We knew there were light kits out there, but neither of us are electricians. Linda decided it was worth my potential electrocution to see if we could do it ourselves.

All it took was a trip to The Home Depot, $25 and 10 minutes of my time and IT WORKS.

Here are pictures to show the difference. The first picture is the room fully lit to its full potential prior to the light kit being added.