Home Lighting Tips: How to Brighten up your Home
Light is a mood-setter, a means of setting the tone and ambience of a home. It can spell the difference between a cozy room where you’ll be able to unwind and relax your mind, and a room that will leave you all the more stressed out.
A nice lampshade when properly placed can turn a dim uncomfortable area into an inviting place to hang-out. More importantly, light brightens up a place and enables people to perform and accomplish tasks that they cannot do in the dark. It makes you feel safe, comfortable and allows you to make the most out of any room.
For these reasons, lighting is indeed one of the most important aspects of home decoration. When lighting up your home, there are three fundamental types of lighting work: general, task and accent lighting. By properly combining these three types together, you can achieve a home that is efficiently and beautifully lit.
General lighting which is also known as ambient lighting provides the overall illumination of the area. Task lighting enables you to do and accomplish specific tasks such as reading, writing, cooking, playing, studying and many others. Lastly, accent lighting adds beauty and drama to your home by lighting up furniture or any other thing that is visually interesting such as a painting or a statue.
Different areas in your home require different strategies of lighting system since each room has distinct purposes. It’s important to recognize this need and suffice it by providing appropriate lighting.
Here are various lighting tips for the different rooms in your house:
Living Room
We start with the living area since this is the first room that welcomes people who enter your home. When putting up a lighting plan for this area in your house, it’s important to take into account the various activities that happen here. The three types of lighting should all be included in this room. General lighting is important to enable people to see things and walk smoothly around the room.
Overall illumination for watching television and talking with guests are important. Meanwhile, task lighting is for reading or playing board games with your kids or friends and accent lighting will accentuate any statues or artworks that you have in this area. A drum lampshade can deliver task lighting for reading when placed in a table corner beside the couch at an eye level. At the same time it can also serve as accent lighting for the little indoor plant on that same table corner.
Bedroom
Next stop is your personal area which is the bedroom. Being a room for rest and relaxation, it’s imperative to be able to light up a bedroom in such a way that will create a relaxing and calming atmosphere that will enable you to doze off to dreamland with ease. Here, a combination of general and task lighting is needed.
Swing-arm lamps that are installed on the wall are efficient providers of adequate light for your reading while saving space on your night table for books or desk clock. But if you prefer traditional table lamp shades, it’s often a good idea to opt for those that do not have too wide bases to maximize the space of your night table.
These table lamps can also be placed on the dressing table to give enough lighting for grooming. It’s also nice to have dimming controls in your bedroom as these are excellent in providing you flexible light that you can adjust to suit your needs and moods. Don’t forget to consider the age and lifestyle of the occupant/s when lighting up this room. Aside from making sure that the lights are installed according to function and style, it’s also important that the lighting of the room emanates the personality of the person occupying it.
Dining Room
Now we go to another favourite room in the house where families love spending time in, doing what is often seen as one of the best pleasures in life—eating. Eating combined with heart-to-heart talks and laughter with your whole family surely make the dining room one of the best rooms in the house.
Again, general, task and accent lighting are needed in this room to make sure that family eating time goes as smoothly as possible. General lighting should provides sufficient light to make sure that even the tiniest piece of food can be seen by your naked eye.
Task lighting will enable you to perform other non-eating activities such as doing homework, clearing up the plates, or arranging the table and utensils. A chandelier lampshade serves both function and style by giving you general lighting for dining and spending time with the family while adding a beautiful and stylish glow to the room. There are many varieties of chandeliers that you can choose from—traditional or modern, direct or indirect light, and so on—depending on your family’s needs and personalities.
Dimmers are also great to have in this room to suit the light for different dining atmospheres. A romantic dinner for two can be made even sweeter with low and soft lighting while bright cheerful light is ideal a fun family get-together.
Kitchen
Another important part of the house which is mostly a work area is the kitchen where food masterpieces are created. General and task lighting are the primary light sources needed for this room. Here you can use pendants to provide both general and task lighting. You have the option to choose from a variety of pendants such as standard, xenon, incandescent, halogen (either with indirect light or direct light with shades).
These lights can be suspended from the ceiling to produce light for the table, kitchen counters and other working areas.
Bathroom
People who are obsessed with good grooming often spend a lot of time in the bathroom. But even if nobody in your family spends five hours straight in there, it still needs a lot of good, shadow-free lighting to enable you to do your grooming, shaving, bathing, applying of make-up with ease.
Small bathrooms can be illuminated well with mirror lights but larger bathrooms on the other hand may need additional ceiling fixtures for general lighting. Well-mounted fixtures as well as a petite square lamp shade can add flair to your bathroom.
Outdoor
The interior of the house should not be the only area of concern when it comes to lighting. Equally important is the exterior of the house which requires proper lighting to make your home safer and more secure. Having sufficient outdoor lighting also enables the family to have a great time outdoors doing barbecue parties or having a backyard camping with the kids.
To ensure the security of the house, it’s best to light up any side of the house that would be in shadow. Since it’s impractical and expensive to light up the outside of the house all night, it’s a good idea to invest on motion sensitive light that will turn on if it senses someone approaching or a light that has an automatic timer which you can set to turn off at a certain hour. Interior lights with timers are also great to use to make your home look as if there are people occupying it while you’re away for a vacation.
Needless to say, lights are a vital part of your house. Turn your home into a safe, inviting and comfortable place with proper and efficient lighting to brighten and liven it up.
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