My Hideous Kitchen Lighting

I live in a darling apartment in Richmond's historic Fan District. Two of my favorite things about my place are the large windows and high ceilings in every room. Windows on the building's East and West facades receive the most sunlight throughout the day, as my apartment is situated closely between two other buildings on its North and South sides. Unfortunately my bedroom windows look out to the brick wall of the condos next door, but that's okay since I'm only at home to sleep (thanks for that, grad school).

The picture below was taken in my kitchen around 1:30 pm on a day in mid-September. Daylight is flooding the space and no electrical lights are needed (you'll see why this is a good thing in a moment). The window in the background is East-facing. You can see the empty planter on the sil beneath the North-facing window in the foreground. We've attempted to grow herbs in it several times, but the building next door blocks the direct sunlight needed to keep our basil and parsley plants alive :(

See how lovely it is during the day? Bright and cheery:

And here, dear friends, is what I consider the most beautiful (read: horrific) light fixture on the planet: our large, finicky, and hideously ugly fluorescent overhead light. The plastic lattice-work, the yellow-tinged light cover, the shape, the sickening glow it casts throughout the kitchen - it's all bad. Bad bad bad. Plus, you can never count on it actually turning on, which we've complained about to our property management company several times. But of course, whenever someone is sent over to inspect it, the work turns on flawlessly. 

This is what said hideous light looks like turned on during the day. My kitchen walls go from off-white to straight up yellow:

We have under-cabinet task lighting that puts off a ton of light. This is really quite helpful at night, when the hideous overhead fixture simply casts its yucky yellow glow instead of actually illuminating the kitchen.

Most of our food preparation happens here. I seldom need to turn the under-cabinet light on during daytime hours:

And here is the hideous light in all its glory. This shot was taken at approximately 9:30 pm.

Thankfully, this incandescent pendant light puts off a crisper, more even light. Notice how the walls around the pendant actually look white - this leads me to believe that the Color Rendering Index of the lamps (or light bulbs to the layman) is higher than that of the fluorescent tubes in the yucky yellow light.

When I eventually buy a place of my own, I know that, after my experience in this kitchen, I will absolutely have an invested interest in the lighting of my kitchen!