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john_l_0408

Lighting conundrum in small laundry-powder combo

9 days ago

Hello all,


We have an overhead light conundrum that I am hoping you can help us resolve.


We're in the midst of renovating a bathroom off of our kitchen, and turning it into a combination laundry room and powder room. The space previously served as a full bath, to permit the former owner to live on the main level without going upstairs, but (1) we have no need for a full bath off the kitchen, and (2) it makes more sense to bring the laundry up from the basement. We are also adding a closet, because this old home's layout has been largely untouched, which means there are basically no closets. This will be the only toilet on the main level, so we anticipate that it will receive a fair amount of traffic, but it is not the guest bath, or a space where we anticipate people will be getting ready frequently.


We thought we had reached decisions on most of the major issues, but we're in the middle of demo and starting to question our lighting decisions. As we are mid demo, I don't have any pictures of the space, because I don't think they'd be too useful, but here is the layout, without any overhead lighting:


Essentially, the room is divided into a laundry half and a toilet half. We are pretty set on having sconces flank the mirror over the sink. The mirror is one we found at an estate sale, and it has some detailing at the top that make an overhead bath bar pretty inappropriate:


(this is not the exact mirror, but it is the same basic style). To keep things proportionate and on theme, our intention is to flank it with candle sconces.


Our initial plan was two, 4" recessed lights overhead, one for the laundry half of the room, one for the toilet half, like so:


We have started to question ourselves, however, because that seems like a lot of light for the toilet half of the room (2'x4' window, 1 recessed light, 2 sconces). So we were wondering about throwing a larger overhead light in the middle of the room, and then putting a utility light in the closet, like so:


The ceilings are about 8' 3" in this space, so we were contemplating something like this:


which is similar to the fixture in our upstairs hallway, or perhaps even something like this:


which might be too much for such a small space, but would go well with the mirror imo.


What say you? Are we overthinking things? Should we stick with the original recessed lighting plan? Or is a single semi-flush fixture the way to go?

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