I guess this fits here as well as anywhere...it's more about possible ways of doing it...not the electrical portion. I have what I would guess is called a sort of tray ceiling in my kitchen. The ceiling is dropped to only 7ft in most of the kitchen, with a raised center portion (8ft height) about 6 x 8 ft in size. There are 2 exposed bulb fluorescent fixtures in the raised portion with a stained oak frame and diffuser panels at the 7ft height. [ATTACH]33584[/ATTACH] Don't as me why they built it this way but apparently it was pretty common around here in '90. Why would they intentionally want to make a room look smaller? The living and dining rooms have tall vaulted ceilings and the rest are standard 8'. They even put skylights in the laundry and bath to open them up and bring in more light. Could be worse I guess, neighbors kitchen has a ceiling fan in an even smaller tray section, with an ugly flushmount on each side. Talk about useless. Wifey has always wanted to maybe pull down the frame and diffuser panels to give the kitchen a more open look. Maybe put some cans or some sort of directional "cool" looking fixture up. Couple of problems I can see so far. The boxes that the fixtures are wired to aren't centered in the space (they are about 8" closer to the back, towards the vent), so there's no way to just swap the boxes for cans and add some more cans and keep it symmetrical. Just blanking them would look terrible. I highly doubt I could patch them and have it look presentable. Most of the fancy fixtures I kind of like feed from the center, so that won't work either. Another thing is that although the inner portion of the tray is textured just like the rest of the walls and ceilings, for some ridiculous reason, they didn't tape the joints between the 7' ceiling and the vertical walls of the tray.:wall: I think I can get around that by using some outside corner molding painted the ceiling color. Maybe add some crown up in the tray as well. My other concern is shadows. Just as a test I removed some of the diffusers and I get some pretty harsh shadows. I imagine cans or fancy track lighting would be even worse when trying to work at the counters or sink. I have some under cabinet fixtures (that I plan to eventually replace with LED ribbon lights). Those really help, but if I lose the diffuse light from the ceiling, I'm not sure it will be enough. I thought about just painting the wood frame to at least lighten up the ceiling some. Just not sure that would look so great. Ideally, the ceiling would be ripped down and redone to the bottom of the trusses like everywhere else in the house, but that's not gonna happen. So, any thoughts?

[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/5qNrMGL.png[/IMG] I have in mind two versions, from [url=http://www.fastcap.com/estore/pc/Speed-Brace-4p2457.htm]SpeedBrace - FastCap - Woodworking Tools[/url] [LIST] [*]15" x 18" [*]8" x 12" [/LIST]Would either size be sufficient?