Blinded by the Light -- How bright does the bathroom need to be?

We just moved to a bigger place with 3 bedrooms and 2 baths. We checked out the energy bill from the previous tenants, and it was a shocking 200 dollars (!). Immediately, C went into action to make sure that we do not continue that trend.

Now, this sounds kind of dumb to me because changing light bulbs just seems so obvious and non-exciting. But, if you look at lists of green things to do, changing to CFL bulbs is always at or near the top. At our old place, we had no choice because the lights were those long tube lights found in schools, but all of our lamps were CFL powered. Now, we had many more lights to deal with, all using regular light bulbs.

C went around changing as many light bulbs as he could (we had a small stockpile of CFLs that we had bought on sale), but when he ran out of CFLs, he just started taking light bulbs out. The light in the girl's room has four lightbulbs -- they were 4 regular light bulbs -- now we have one CFL.
Savings?
We replaced 4 60-watt bulbs with one bulb that uses 13 watts = 227 watt savings.

Each bathroom had 3 regular bulbs -- now they each have 1 CFL. Honestly, 3 was pretty blinding. I don't know if I want to see that well in the bathroom.
Savings?
6 60-watt bulbs (360) for 2 13-watt bulbs (26) = 334 watt savings.

In one bedroom and 2 bathrooms, that's a 561 watt savings, and we only used 3 bulbs!

The City of Austin offers coupons for packages of CFL (I think it's good at Home Depot). I wasn't going to Home Depot, so I bought a package of 10 at Costco for 13.99. Well worth it.

Some people complain about the light that CFLs give off. It doesn't bother me, but if you don't car for it, you might try the following:

• Buy a CFL that gives off white light (these are different from the regular CFLs)
• Consider how many light bulbs you really need. Do you need 3 bulbs over the bathroom mirror? Maybe it won't be so annoying if there's only one.
• Use a nice lampshade.