A friend and I bought a small bakery, which we are expanding into the empty space next door to give us a much larger retail area and decorating area, and we need to purchase lighting for the decorating area.

The health dept requires us to use either shatterproof bulbs or have fixture covers.

I need the area to be as bright as sunlight because I know I'll be working lots of long nights and shadows VEX me.

After shopping quite a bit for lighting, it seems the options are incandescent (not energy efficient), fluorescent (cheap but can fade colors on dummies - no biggie), and halogen (WAY too freaking hot, too tiny/spotlight-ish, and they don't have covers anyway).

What do you have in your brightly-lit shop? Fluorescent tubes? What wattage (if you know)? How many watts per sq ft is ideal for a window-less decorating area?

Thanks bunches!

Don't everybody answer at once or anything. Must be weird to not know what kind of lighting is in your own shop.

For anybody's future reference, I went with 3 watts of fluorescent lighting per sq ft of space.

ooh you're in Texas! Do you have a pic or a link of the kind you used? I'm meeting w/ my designer for the first time tomorrow and that's a note I made to myself...lighting.

The good thing though is that I have a wall of windows facing the sun, so my space is always nice and bright..so I shouldn't have to rely on the lighting too much.

Here ya go

http://www.homedepot.com/Lighting-Fans-Fluorescent-Lighting/h_d1/N-5yc1vZ1xg8Zare3/R-100180403/h_d2/ProductDisplay?langId=-1&storeId=10051&catalogId=10053

If the link doesn't work, go to Home Depot dot com and it's the first item under Lighting --> Fluorescent.

The thing that I learned after working in a room for the last few years that was primarily lit by sunlight is that the color is always different in the room, depending on how high or how low the sun is in the sky. I wanted to make sure I had lots of bright, artificial lighting so the colors I'm seeing are consistent. That's just something that bugged me though.