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Before we start this post, we just want to say that our thoughts and prayers are going out to everyone affected by Superstorm Sandy. Much of our family lives in the Mid-Atlantic and East Coast regions. We are very thankful that they are safe and sound tonight. We hope our readers are safe tonight and keeping warm. Please be safe! We are thinking of you.

I love the look of soft mood lighting. It makes a home so cozy! And I saved one of our most exciting Ikea finds for last.

Recently, BJ and I made a small lighting upgrade to the kitchen that made a huge difference in the room. When BJ installed our new cabinet lights from Ikea, I was oooo-ing and ahhh-ing every time we turned them on. Even during the day, I can notice a difference in how they light up the counters. Below is a photo of our kitchen during the day. This also similiar to the lights looked in the Ikea showroom when we found them. The direct light right on the counters really helps when you are prepping and preparing meals.

Nothing beats how the lights look at night. And with our already installed cool white led rope lighting, the kitchen is so warm and welcoming. I call it a “gourmet glow.”

These lights are great because they give an expensive look, but are reasonably priced to install.

To give our kitchen the “gourmet glow” we bought and installed five Grundtal lights.

To connect the lights on one switch, we used two power supply cords and three connector cords.

Because we have two separate sets of cabinets, we used three connector cords and two power cords to plug the lights into two different outlets. If we had one straight set of cabinets, we would need four connector cords and one power cord. Here is how our outlets are set up:

When we built our house two years ago, we asked the builders to install a switch for two outlets, one above the each set of cabinets so we could later install over-cabinet lighting. If you do not have a pre-installed switch and outlet, you can install one or hire an electrician to install one for you.

With the appraisal still on the horizon, adding the over cabinet lighting was a great way to help increase the value of our home with little investment. It took BJ about 45 minutes to install all the lights.

Have you made any quick and easy upgrades that made a big impact to your home?

The pantry is finally finished. When you open the door, it is easy to find exactly what you are looking for. I love it!

Before I started working on our pantry this was my inspiration.

And now our pantry looks like this, the top view:

And the bottom:

We have a lot more food in our pantry than the first inspiration photo and we also have a mix of boxes and vacuumed sealed containers. But for us, this works.

Before our pantry looked like this:

It was chaos. I also had trouble with the cans on the bottom shelf. They took up a lot of real estate and you couldn’t really see what was there. We decided to solve that problem by looking for something that we could put under the bottom of the pre-existing pantry shelves. We found this stacking shelf system at the Container Store and it works perfectly.

I also took our organizing one step further and labeled the majority of our containers. And because I am a Weight Watchers Lifetime Member, I have all the serving sizes and PointsPlus values written under the name of each product. For the baking and cooking products, I just labeled them with their name.

So our pantry is finally organized and hopefully it will stay this way for a long time. I love opening the door and finding everything I need without digging around. And because we used vacuumed sealed containers to store much of our food, we don’t have to worry about food going stale quickly. It’s a win-win!