DIY: How to Do It Like I Do

Well my amazing subscribers, you are in for a real treat. I’ve been making important changes to my home, DIY changes. With my infinite wisdom as a formidable sage of all knowledge, I will guide you through how you too can improve the world around you just as I have.

Now that I own the home of the commoner, I see many things that make this pedestrian house barely livable. Imagine you are walking into a room when you are suddenly enveloped by darkness. Fumbling around, not knowing what way is up or down, or if you are about step over the precipice of a great abyss. It is this that threatens my existence, and this threat is in my very kitchen, lurking, under the cabinets. Can you even imagine being neck-deep in preparing Consommé and you can't even see the spoon? This was my reality.

The best part is that I will share the solution with you, my reader. You will benefit from the hours and hours of my research, the sleepless nights of designing and redesigning, the days and days of meditation and reflection on what is light, and most importantly, you will no longer live in darkness in your own home.

What follows here is a step-by-step guide. I will only take full responsibility in the case of your success. It proves you listened to me and I know what I'm talking about. If you, however, stay from the path, I am NOT responsible for your failure. You could also be hurt or slapped with a fine for code violations, also not my problem. Please check all local codes before completing any work on your home; I am not legally allowed to tell you directly “disregard code, do what I say, and never tell anyone you didn't get the $297 permit to complete your $16.89 project”

So here we go:

Do It Yourself: Under Cabinet Lighting

Step 1: Get a house with a kitchen that has cabinets but no lighting underneath them

This is apparently a lot easier than I thought. Does nobody light up the dark places in their house? I mean how many homes have you seen where there are no pipes to the bathroom tub or toilet, or no stairs to the top floor, or no heating in the building for the swimming pool?

*I know, there should be a better picture here. It is the hallmark of a good DIY blog post, but my kitchen is so dark it has swallowed the light of my flash. I promise more images bathed in radiant light will follow.

Step 2: Get all the parts


For this, you must go to the store of all things home-change, IKEA. Notice I did not say improvement, we are not trying to improve. We are going to change, heal, complete, make whole, correct an injustice.

Step 2b: Ogle the Parts

I have chosen the OMLAPP lights for their lack of cost in the clearance state. Never mind if the colors are different, unless your guests intend to lounge on your counter, nobody will ever know. FYI: although the lights look different, the light that comes out is the same.

Step 3: Get out your tools

If you don't know what tools are or fail to see what they are going to be needed for - STOP NOW! This is an advanced DIY and you cannot continue without a comprehensive knowledge of tools. Click here to get smarter (you are welcome). You will need every one of the tools you see here. I assume you have a large cache of tools, if not - STOP AGAIN! Go get some. These and a few thousand dollars worth of others should be good.

Step 4: Remove the cabinets from the walls

That right, get up there and take them down. This is important for 2 reasons.

One: it will shock your Instagram followers. This makes them watch your whole story about your DIY project, which boosts your engagement, which will make your followers more likely to share it, which triggers the algorithms to promote your profile, thus will getting you more followers, which will give you a bigger endorsement deal, and you will become wealthy like me.

B: you can't have wires showing. These lights were designed by Swedish geniuses, we can't have you installing them like a kindergartener that just discovered glue.

Third: it is way easier to install lights perfectly when you don't have to lay down on your counter and look up. Removing 6 screws from the wall will save your back.
And as a bonus, you get to empty your cabinets and throw out that bottle of rum you have kept for 12 years but never opened. Let's be real, you will never drink it and it doesn't get better with age.

Step 5: Get power up there

It's safe to assume the builder of your pedestrian house did not think to include switch-controlled wiring for your cabinet lighting system. But in most houses built after 1910, there are outlets just above the counter for your panini press. You can simply get power from inside that outlet and run it up inside the wall to a new outlet.

For the sake of argument and to appease the City of Portland permitting office - let's just assume the outlet you see way up there has always been there. If you also need help "finding" an outlet right where you needed it, I can cover that in another DIY.

Do not skip this step and do not cook yourself installing it. Skipping this step will leave the power cord for your epic lighting system sticking out next to your panini press like an eyesore for everyone to gock at which will bring much shame to you and your house. And if you cook yourself on live electrical wires, you could die or worse.

Step 7: Install the lights on the cabinet

Now it's starting to come together. A couple of things here.
1) don't break the light
2) line up everything perfect
3) don't let the screws go all the way through the wood to the inside of the cabinet where it will stick out and scratch you fine bone china.

Step 8: Put the cabinet back where you found it

This part is a lot easier if you have a third and fourth hand or multiple set of hands belonging to another person who happens to stop by because you paid them to be there and install your lights because they were in the neighborhood to return your 1st edition "Tools & How to Use Them" they borrowed 6 years ago. It's not super important to have help, but it helps.

Make sure the cabinets are level, don't assume the installer did everything perfectly the first time. Make sure the wires are behind the cabinets before you snug everything in, that was the whole point of taking these things down in the first place. And straighten the doors before you are done, you want everything looking sharp in the glorious new light. And touch up the paint, you can't have scratches, you are going to see so much better soon.

Step 9: Get Power Up There

All those huge bulky TRÅDFRI LED drivers you got from IKEA get plugged into the outlets you found above your cabinets. You want to hide them real good so anyone looking has no idea there is 857 ft of extra wire coiled up there. Yes, IKEA, you could have made all the cables 90% shorter and they still would have been too long.

Step 10: Program the switch.

I love paying for licensed and permitted electrical work as much as the next guy, but there is a limit to how much work you can pay someone else to do before it's not considered DIY. So to keep this DIY-friendly and all in the same IKEA ecosystem, we will use the TJÄDERBÖRKSNÄSMOLN dimmer switch.

It will stick anywhere once but destroy your sheetrock and never stick again if you fail to install it perfectly and try repositioning it just a little. So, do it perfect the first time.

Step 11: Look at the breathtaking spectacle that is my work of art.

You only create this oasis of glorious light because I told you how; you have good listening skills. I'm incredible and your work shows it. Now your Consommé is going to be amazing like mine. 

You're welcome.