Put the Outlet Where the Thing Lives
Nine recessed lights are staying.
That was the shortest conversation we had all week. The kitchen ceiling in a whole home renovation we have going in Oakland Township already has nine cans landing more or less where we want light, so they stay, and nobody patches a ceiling to prove a point. Every other line on that electrical plan took a walkthrough, because the electrician starts within a week or two while the cabinets are still eight to twelve weeks out depending on the line. Power gets roughed in long before a single box arrives, so whatever that drawing says now is what the house gets.
So we walked it asking one question over and over. Where does this thing actually live when nobody is using it?
Every upstairs vanity is getting an outlet inside a drawer. Hair dryers, toothbrush chargers, the flat iron that never goes back in the cabinet. Those things live in the drawer, so the power goes in the drawer, and the counter stays a counter.
The laundry room has a tall cabinet built to hold a full size vacuum standing up, bottom shelves left out on purpose. There is an outlet inside it. The vacuum charges where it is stored rather than trailing a cord across the room to the only free wall.
The pantry has an appliance shelf, so it gets an outlet in the backsplash behind it. The mixer and the toaster stay plugged in behind a door.
Under that same shelf we want an LED strip, and running a wire down to a wall switch meant opening a wall that is already finished. So the switch is a Bluetooth puck stuck to the shelf instead. Same light, no drywall repair. The pantry gets a motion sensor on top of that, because the person walking into a pantry has both hands full every single time.
The one placement decision to note was the chandelier, which goes over the dining table and not over the island. An island wants light you can work under. A table wants a fixture hung low enough to shrink the room at night, centered on the table, which is almost never centered on the room.
What surprises people is the price of all this, or the lack of one. An outlet inside a cabinet costs about what an outlet on a wall costs. The expensive version is the one added in February, after the cabinet is hung and the backsplash is grouted. What it really takes is a decision made in the right week by somebody who knows what is going into that cabinet, because an electrician cannot rough in for a vacuum nobody has mentioned to him. That overlap is most of what full service design actually is, the couple of weeks when the cabinet drawing and the electrical plan have to agree with each other and somebody has to be reading both.
The list our electrician is working from at that house is not really a lighting plan. It is an inventory of what plugs in, and where each of those things sits when it is put away.
