Planning Electrical & Lighting for a Kitchen Remodel

Electrical and lighting decisions get made too late in a lot of kitchen remodels, and it's usually the homeowner who pays for it later—either with a change order mid-project or with a kitchen that looks great but doesn't function the way they hoped. If you're starting to plan a remodel, this is the part worth slowing down on before you fall in love with a layout. Here's how we walk clients through it.

Start With How You Actually Use the Kitchen

Before anything gets drawn up, think through your daily routine. Where do you actually prep food? Where does the coffee maker, toaster, and mixer live? Do you have two people cooking at once, or is this a one-cook kitchen with room for others to hang around an island? Lighting and outlet placement should follow how the space gets used, not just where the old wiring happens to be.

A lot of the North Shore homes we work in—older colonials and cape cods in Wilmette, Glencoe, and Winnetka, split-levels in Buffalo Grove and Wheeling, larger builds in Lake Forest and Riverwoods—were wired decades ago for a kitchen that functioned very differently than kitchens do now. One overhead fixture and a couple of outlets was standard. If you're gutting the space anyway, this is your one real chance to fix that.

Map Out Your Layers of Lighting

Good kitchen lighting isn't one decision, it's three:

• Ambient/general lighting — the base level of light in the room, often recessed cans or a central fixture
• Task lighting — under-cabinet lights over counters, pendant lighting over an island or sink, focused light where you actually need to see what you're cutting or reading
• Accent lighting — cabinet interior lights, toe-kick lighting, lighting inside glass-front cabinets

Most kitchens we remodel end up with all three, layered so they can be controlled separately. That means separate switches or dimmers for recessed cans versus under-cabinet lights versus pendants—not everything on one switch. It costs a little more up front in wiring and switches, but it's the difference between a kitchen that has one "on" setting and one that can go from bright task lighting for cooking to something softer for entertaining.

Think About Circuits, Not Just Outlets

This is where things get technical, and it's also where DIY planning tends to go sideways. Kitchens have specific electrical requirements under the National Electrical Code, adopted with local amendments here in Illinois, covering things like dedicated small-appliance circuits, GFCI protection near sinks and counters, and spacing requirements for countertop outlets. If you're adding an island, moving a range, upgrading to a higher-draw appliance like an induction cooktop or a built-in espresso machine, or adding a microwave drawer, each of those may need its own dedicated circuit.

Older homes are the wild card here. A lot of North Shore houses built from the 1950s through the 1980s have electrical panels that were adequate for the era but are maxed out or close to it once you add modern kitchen circuits, especially if you're also adding recessed lighting throughout an open-concept space. Part of our job early in the process is figuring out whether your panel has room to add circuits or whether a panel upgrade needs to be part of the project. Better to know that at the planning stage than after cabinets are hung.

Don't Forget the Island

Kitchen islands cause more electrical replanning than almost anything else in a remodel. If you're adding one, or enlarging an existing one, you'll need to decide on outlet placement (often on the side, sometimes with pop-up outlets on the surface), whether it's getting a cooktop or sink that needs its own circuit and shutoff, and how many pendants will hang above it and on what kind of switching. All of that has to be roughed in before drywall and cabinets go in, which is why this planning has to happen well before demo day, not during it.

Where Permits Come In

Electrical work in a kitchen remodel typically requires permits in North Shore municipalities, and requirements vary a bit town to town—Highland Park, Deerfield, Lake Forest, Glenview, and the others each have their own building department with their own review process and timeline. This isn't something to guess at or skip. Permitted work gets inspected, which protects you when you sell the house and protects you from insurance headaches if there's ever an electrical fire. We handle the permitting and inspections as part of the project, but it's worth knowing upfront that this adds time to the schedule—usually a few weeks depending on the town—so it should be factored into your timeline expectations, especially if you're hoping to have a kitchen back in service before the holidays.

Get the Rough-In Right the First Time

Once cabinets, backsplash, and drywall are in, moving an outlet or adding a switch means cutting into finished surfaces. That's the expensive way to fix a lighting plan. The right time to finalize your electrical layout is when you're finalizing your cabinet layout, appliance selections, and countertop plan—all together, because they all affect each other. An island with a waterfall countertop needs its outlets placed differently than one without. A 36-inch range pulls more than a 30-inch one. These small decisions ripple through the electrical plan.

Costs for electrical and lighting work vary quite a bit depending on how much of the existing wiring you're keeping, whether a panel upgrade is needed, and how many fixtures and circuits you're adding—there's no single number that applies to every kitchen. Our kitchen remodeling process includes walking through this with you early, before you've committed to a layout you might need to change.

Considering a remodel on Chicago's North Shore? Reach out to J.P. Construction to talk through your project and get a free estimate.