5 Tips for Improving the Lighting in Your Home

While it doesn’t get nearly as much air time as topics like paint, décor, rug patterns, or room layout, lighting in your home is a huge factor in how warm and welcoming a home feels. Unfortunately, many homeowners are getting their lighting all wrong – at the expense of their home’s mood and feel. Luckily, there’s a way to fix this. By following these five lighting tips, it’s easy to overhaul your home’s illumination and make it into a brighter and more welcoming environment.

1. Layer your lighting

In rooms where people gather for long periods of time and often pass the transition from day to night and vice versa (living rooms, for example), it’s important to pay particular attention to layering light. Layered light allows people to adjust the lighting to accommodate different activities, such as dining, reading, and watching movies. To layer your lighting correctly, ensure that you have ambient lighting at the top of the room, either in the form of a valance or integrated lighting. In addition to your ambient lighting, you should also have table lamps and an overhead light wired to a wall switch. As a general rule, your ambient lighting should be approximately 1,500-3,000 lumens while your reading or table lamps should fall around 400 lumens.

2. Place lighting in pivotal areas

Think about your kitchen for a moment: you do most of the work on your counters and in the sink, but very few homeowners have lighting in these pivotal areas. To make your kitchen more functional, install LED or compact fluorescent lighting in these areas. This makes your kitchen more welcoming and improves the presentation of food.

3. Avoid downward-facing shadows

Shadows can be incredibly unflattering, especially in places like the bathroom. To eliminate shadows and improve the feel of your bathroom, eliminate any over-the-mirror fixtures and replace them with fixtures on both sides of the mirror. This combined lighting should amount to about 4,000-8,000 lumens.

4. Pay attention to outdoor spaces

Outdoor lighting serves two purposes: safety and aesthetics. On one hand, outdoor lighting is designed to provide illumination for stairways, decks, and sidewalks. On the other, it’s meant to make your outdoor space beautiful and comfortable. With this in mind, it’s important to install outdoor lighting according to its functionality and durability. Nobody wants to replace outdoor lighting on a regular basis and purchasing sturdy fixtures in the first place will alleviate the need to do this.

5. Install dimmers

In rooms where mood lighting is required, such as dining rooms and bedrooms, dimmers will be your best friend. Installing them can overhaul the look of existing lighting by making it softer and more adjustable for different times of day or night. They can also help you save money on utility bills.

Whether you’ve just purchased a new home or you’re seeking to make your existing one more comfortable, upgrading and improving the lighting in your home is a fantastic way to do this quickly and easily.