Since I had lots of little projects that I needed help on this past weekend I thought it was only fair that Jon got to have a little fun as well. So Saturday morning he went off fishing and came home with dinner!

While Jon was doing that I stayed home and did some prep work on our little projects.

When Jon returned the first project up was adding some pendant lights above our kitchen sink.

Here is our before:

Nothing wrong with it, but since the whole kitchen is lighted with high-hats I wanted to have a little bit of fun with lighting and the easiest place to get my fix was above the sink. Like I mentioned in last weeks post I didn’t like any of the options in the recessed lighting & pendant combo kits  at my local home improvement stores and a simple recessed lighting converter kit without the pendant still came in at $40 and I wanted something a bit more budget friendly.

Here is what you will need to get the look for less:

The crucial pieces to my less than $5 converter solution are these:

Socket to Outlet Converter
Non grounding plug

Here is how it works.

Step 1: Figure out the perfect spot for your lighting and measure length.

Step 2: Add an additional inch to your measurement and then cut wire with a wire stripper:

Step 3: Use a razor to slice open the tubing the wires are encased in:

{When you check out the wires some pendants will have 2 and some will have 3. Ours came with 3 which meant our green wire was a grounding wire. Because we didn’t have a grounding outlet we disregarded the green wire.}

Step 4: Take your wire stripper and strip your wires:

Once the two wires are exposed we took the grounding wire that was unnecessary for our project and wrapped it against the tube casing with electrical tape:

Step 5: Take your non grounding plug and pry it open:

Place bottom piece through wires:

Take the opposite end of plug and loosen screws:

Take your wires and thread them around screws:

One wire behind each screw and then tighten:

Then connect bottom piece of plug to the top piece:

Voila you have now added a plug to your pendant light:

Step 6: Convert your high-hat to a pendant light. You now have a plug on your hanging pendant that fits perfectly into socket to outlet converter.

You simply screw in your socket to light converter in the high hat as if it was a light bulb:

Then take your pendant light with it’s new plug and plug it in!

You will then take the top piece of the pendant light and slide it up so that it covers the high hat opening and use the screw it has to tighten it into place:

All finished:

Super happy with outcome and love that it was budget friendly. Each pendant came in at $25 and the pieces to convert my high hat into a pendant friendly feature was $3.50 per pendant.

*FYI: We are not electricians so please recreate this at your own risk. We’ve never had a problem with this wiring set up, but each house is different so it’s to you if you decide to try it out.