Happy Mommy Day to you!
Wow - is this your Mommy Day present?

We are just finishing our kitchen - we put in GMLighting LED LARC bars. I liked the look the best for UC. They are 3000K and can be dimmed. These are in and I like them so far.
These run off a central switch which controls all of the UC lights.

We are putting Kimberly tape light in our glass cabinets. Should be installed this week. I was originally going to put in puck lights but changed to tape.

Prices are all over the place depending what you want to do and what companies you use.

I personally have never liked CFL or other fluorescent lighting, so didn't want to install at this time.
Xenon is very warm and wanted to be a bit "greener"

Good luck!

PS - Check posts on the lighting forum for other ideas.

And don't forget to post pictures!!

Happy Mother's Day to you too! I love my new undercabinet lighting. You will hear from others about LED lights, and I originally wanted them too but my electrician started talking about the number of drivers needed in my non-continuous runs of uppers (or something... it got technical) and the materials cost was going to be higher than I was prepared for. Anyway, I ended up with direct-wire fluorescent bar lights from HD and they are working very, very well for me. They are the instant-on, no-flicker variety and ridiculously inexpensive --- $20 for 24" and $30 for 36". I don't have long stretches of uppers so all the UC lights in my kitchen were under $100. (plus labor.) It was very worth it.

I absolutely did not want UC lights that put off heat (the halogen lights in my range hood once melted marshmallows in the cabinet above), so that limited me to fluorescent and LED. I will tell you, the fluorescents I got from HD came with T5 bulbs in cool white. The main ceiling light and the cans that were in my kitchen already had soft (warm) white CF bulbs, which made a very... interesting... look when they were all turned on together. Everything you read online says to use warm white in a kitchen, but I realized in short order that I really preferred the cool. So I have changed out my couple of cans to "bright white" which is close to the same color temp as the T5's without being blue, and I will be changing out my central fixture bulbs soon. All this is just to tell you that choosing kitchen lighting will make your head explode because just when you think you have it figured out, somebody asks you how many kelvins you want them to be, and then there is one more decision you have no idea how to make. ha! Just make sure you can get a different color if you don't like whatever they come with and you will be fine. I don't think you can really know until you see it in your kitchen with all the cabinets in place. Warm white fluorescent makes my white cabinets look sickly yellow. Maybe warm white LED would be different.

One big difference between LED and fluorescent is the size of the light fixture. My T5 bar lights are about 1.25" tall. If you want a very small or no trim at the bottom of your uppers, spend the money for LED strips because some of those are practically flat. I compromised on my trim (I originally wanted very small trim but ended up with about 1.5" to cover the lights); you will just have to decide whether that matters to you.

Have fun with your kitchen reno! And do, do get undercabinet lighting. It's great. Don't install it too far back since you want to light your work space, not the backsplash. Get bars, not pucks, if you want long continuous light instead of pools (or get lots of pucks close together to avoid that). And don't forget the glass shelves in your cabinets if you get in-cabinet lighting (I don't have that so somebody else can tell you about it).

UC lighting is more than a nice touch. I wouldn't say you can't live without it, but your quality of kitchen experience increases exponentially. I had no idea how much I would love it before we had it.

The cost of kitchen lighting was definitely more that I expected. Did I even have an idea on cost? I don't think I did. In any case, our 7 pot lights (kitchen and dining room combined), a fan light ($89), 2 pendants for the peninsula and UCs came out to around $2300. That doesn't include installation. It does include the various switches and outlets we needed to replace in both rooms, plus the new ones we added.

If you are as clueless as I was, I recommend a trip to your local lighting store. You don't necessarily have to buy from them, but they will help you figure out what's what in very concrete terms. Do it sooner rather than later as some of the wiring is best done before you install cabinets. If you're tearing out wallboard, even better. We have a local Ferguson's where they were very helpful. Truly I was clueless in this one area of our remodel and had a fair amount of trouble making sense of it, so I really appreciated their expertise.

Wow, thanks for all this helpful info! I think my head will explode! Lol...will definitely talk to my GC/electrician about this!

Could someone please explain to me why UC lighting is so essential? I still don't get this.

waterdamage: when we had a single airport landing strip florescent fixture down the middle of the kitchen ceiling, there was lots of general light, but the minute you faced the counter you cast a shadow on your immediate work surface. Because it was that way for 37 years, I never gave it much thought - really, it wasn't horrible and we're adaptable people who make what we have work for us. We also had cabinets over our peninsula and I couldn't see to work properly there, so we put an add-on florescent light under there. How's this for a before picture! Looks like I had about 5 different things going on in there that day:

With the remodel, we removed the large central light fixture and replaced it with 3 pot lights for general lighting and left the light over the sink as is. We put in 2 pendants to light the peninsula. In addition to obvious kitchen things, I also use that space as a sewing and craft table (See above. OMG!) - I need to be able to see. We also added UC lighting which makes the perimeter counters *so* much more usable.

Now I just turn on the lights I need when I need them - no more airport landing strips. Tonight I fixed baked sweet potatoes and roasted cauliflower for dinner. There was still some light outside, so I didn't need the overheads, but I did turn on the UCs and that was just right for the job of getting those 2 things in the oven. Didn't need the pendants so they stayed off. I guess it's the difference between getting by and having great light to see what you're doing. I just never realized what I was missing until we had the new set-up.

It depends on what you do with the area under your upper cabinets. The only way to get direct light onto the countertop below upper cabs is with undercabinet lighting. Light from any other location will be partly blocked by your head and body, casting a shadow on the countertop. So if your countertop is a work surface, like a prep area or a sink, then undercabinet lighting will help you see what you're doing. It's the difference between ambient lighting and task lighting. You could use lamps sitting on the countertop for the same effect, but you'd need a series of them and they would not be tucked up out of the way like fixtures mounted to the bottoms of the cabinets.

I could see my countertops before the UC lighting but there is a big difference with it.

Our before kitchen back when we bought the house, had two lights: one single bulb fixture over the table, and in the middle of the cooking end, an industrial fluorescent fixture with four inch vertical sides that lit up the four square feet of floor under it really well.

This in a room that was paneled floor to ceiling in dark brown paneling from the 1970's. The blind corner cabinet? Needed a flashlight to spelunk in there.

We added a range hood fan with a light, put a five-bulb fixture over the table, replaced the industrial thing, and put a plug-in undercabinet fluorescent under one cabinet. That under cabinet light was the most-used one in the kitchen--in fact I kept it (I have packrat tendencies). That was where I prepped every meal; we left it on while the kitchen was retired for the night, until bedtime.
I knew we getting undercabinet lighting in a big way when we renovated. We have four cabinets with LED strips, and they are great.

Under cabinet lights should be considered as basic as a sink or appliance. Can you picture anyone saying, "Gee, I wish I hadn't bothered putting in the undercabinet lights"--?

Remember that if you get the "stick-on" lighting, it has to plug in somewhere.

If you plan ahead and have an outlet (or capped wires) inside one bottom cabinet of each run, you can install whatever you want later without giving up a plug, or calling back an electrician.

I highly suggest using undercabinet LED lights that don't require transformers. The LEDs put off almost no heat and the fact they run on line voltage means simplicity for the electricians.

We used lights from Philips like the ones below. Make sure they install them so the lens faces back toward the wall.

Billy

Here is a link that might be useful: Philips Undercabinet LED Lights