The lights in our family room are horrible. It's not our fault, the house came that way, honest! As it currently stands, the primary lights for the room are cast by: our tiny little table lamp with a single 40-watt bulb; from the television; and from two massive flood/spotlights in ceiling recessed fixtures. Not the most effective lighting I've ever seen, but at least those flood lights give the four-legged kids a good spotlight to fight under when they're having a moment.

The two large 6" spotlight recessed flood lamps, when not burned out, provide just enough illumination to make everything look hideous, and enough heat to bake a batch of cookies. But right now, yep you guessed it, they're both burned out. This has left us with a less than desirable lighting scenario.

The last thing we want is to have a gaggle of people coming through our house this weekend for the home tour and saying "That house was so small compared to the other houses!" Oh wait, that's the truth and we can't avoid that one bit. What we really want to avoid is to have someone say "The house was nice, except for that one really dark room in the middle." To remedy this situation, I have a plan.

I've longed for more efficient and better looking lights in this room. Is that too much to ask? Additionally, I would LOVE to have light bulbs that don't sound like a swarm of bees has entered the room when they're dimmed to 50%. Am I selfish? Given the current recessed fixtures look like this, I'm going to have to say my feelings are well founded.

I went out this weekend and picked up a few new 6" can recessed light fixtures from our local big box home improvement store. I also grabbed two of the 6" retrofit LED dimmable lights they had available.

My goal was to swap the existing fixtures and pop in the new lights to give our family room a warm and inviting look with efficient and dimmable lighting -- lighting that doesn't look like it would be better suited for illuminating an alley or comedy stage.

I started the project with an easy goal, but quickly ran into problems. The recessed fixtures I had purchased are a standard 6", but the old can's hole was slightly larger than the new one, letting the fixture fall into the ceiling rather than being secured in place by the clips. Instead of throwing my hands in the air and giving up, I came up with an idea. The old cans fit correctly, so why not use that to my advantage?

I began cutting the old can hood with tin snips until I had a ring from the lower rim of the can.

I then slipped that ring over the new can and fit it down over the boot of the can, making the base of the new can the proper size for the old hole. Crisis averted.

Swapping out the fixtures was quick and easy. The one thing that can be tough about these big box can lights are the clips to hold them in place. It can be nearly impossible to snap them into their seats to secure the can. To correct this, I bent the clips to be a little bit wider. Not too far, I just put both hands on them and spread them just a bit. This lets the clip secure the light in place without having to kill yourself to get the clip where it needs to go.

Once the can was in place I just had to pop in the retrofit LED light. The light we chose is one of the Utilitech 6" retrofit devices. Though there were several different options, we went with this version due to the "warm" 2700 K color temperature. If you're not familiar, the lower the temperature the light is rated, the warmer the light appear. We looked at one that was 3000 K, and though it was okay, the 2700 K looks far better in our house.

The install was quick and easy. The retrofit kit just screws into a standard light socket. The back of the light has tension clips that slide into place on the new cans and you're done.

I flipped the circuit back on and we were in business with warm and energy efficient light in a room that was previously a dungeon. The new lights have a far greater spread and are less of a spotlight the way the previous lights were. This really helps to light the whole space rather than highlighting two random areas on either end of the couch.

And with that, we checked another item off of our to do list. We've got this evening and just one more full day left before the home tour. We'll be spending most of Friday frantically getting ready for the tour, but at least now we don't need to worry about people wandering in a dark family room and complaining about "that hideous house with that dark room." We're going to be taking a ton of photos over the next few days and sharing them with you next week, and we can't wait.

Have you used any of these retrofit lighting kits in your house? Or can you think of a place or two where one might be good? We used one previously in our basement stairwell overhaul and liked it enough to use it in our family room too. Do you know of any similar products that offer good results? Let us know.