Why lighting should be at the top of your renovation hit list

Even though it shouldn’t be the case, the lighting aspects of renovations often get overlooked in lieu of other components of the project. Overlooking the lighting as an integral component to your renovation is doing possible injustice to the eventual look and feel of your property. You might consider indoor and outdoor home lighting to be one of the more crucial components of interior and exterior design. In actuality, quality lighting that is well-positioned can have a really impressive impact on how a whole room looks and feels.

Lighting impacts all the details in a room, be it the variety of colors and shades in the fittings and fixtures to how people perceive the available space and size. Proper lighting can also make it a lot easier to do tasks in each specific room. Nobody really wants to cut themselves when shaving since the lighting was bad, nor do they want to head out into the world with some of their lipstick being on their teeth! The following are a number of our best tips for making the most of your lighting when you’re doing a renovation:

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Visualize Your Ideal Qualities For Each Room

Photo by Jason Leung on unsplash

For every room, step inside of it. Then, try to think about how it could possibly look its very best. For instance, if you have a dimly lit room that is rather shadowy, then it isn’t something whose atmosphere is very appealing. Transform the whole mood of the room with properly placed lighting.

On top of that, consider what assets a room has before moving on to how you might accentuate them the best. What details of a room need to be standing out to be the most attractive elements? Aesthetically pleasing fixtures could be marble countertops in your kitchen or just a gorgeous fireplace in your den. If you have them, use accent lighting to highlight them.

Read more: Basic Kitchen Lighting Types for Your Renovation

Accent lighting proves crucial since it makes the most impact on the decor. When done right, it will naturally draw the visual attention of people in the room to the assets that are most pretty or pleasing, be it plants, ornaments, artwork, and even architectural aspects.

Illuminate Based On The Features Of Each Room

Don’t limit your renovation potential by applying the same approach to every kind of room you’re working on. Smart renovation means you pay each room individual attention for its lighting requirements, based on the characteristics of each room. The requirements are going to vary based on factors like the amount of natural light available, the shape of the rooms, the sizes of the rooms, and what fittings or fixtures each room has.

Make Mindful Priorities When You’re On A Budget

Not everyone has endless amounts of money to spend on renovations, which means the prioritizing lighting requirements become necessary. When you first set up your budget, it’s not good to put your lighting on the backburner. If you’re not able to stretch your resources or fund to cover every room, or if you just can’t install a variety of layers of lighting which maximize how each room appears, then you should aim for proper illumination in the foyer, kitchen, bathrooms, and lounge before all else. The more features that you can accentuate, then the better off you will be.

Don’t Overdo Your Lighting

There’s lighting up a room enough, and then there’s going overboard. There’s no need for installing beaming spotlights throughout each room. They’d make sure the rooms are brightly lit, but you’d also drown out any ambiance that could really work out well in some rooms. Pick a mixture of various lighting sources based on each room’s features. This is something known as blending. Doing it can really transform the look and feel of a room. Atmosphere really is important, so prevent blanket brightness whenever you possibly can.

Don’t Rely On Natural Light Too Much

You’re better off when a property lets in lots of natural light. A room will look wonderful when it has sunbeams grazing the wooden flooring. Yet, as soon as the sun is down, your room is going to rely on artificial lighting in order to look and feel wonderful.

Sometimes, natural light isn’t enough to illustrate the best qualities in a room anyway. It’s possible to use desk and floor lamps to complement natural light coming in. This also provides an impression of there being a greater dimension.

Install Fittings For Both Efficiency And Mood

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A bright kitchen can motivate and inspire for the things that need to happen there. Bright lighting also helps in doing this effectively. Straining to see how well your food is doing in a pot or pan can be annoying. The same goes for looking at dishes after they’ve been washed up. Task lighting is the kind of lighting that helps out with completing tasks efficiently. It refers to position bright lighting in a way that it shines on the specific areas where you’ll actually be carrying out your activities.

Dimmer switches for your light fittings can be smart too, since they let you shift your room’s ambiance in just seconds. Once you cook a meal thanks to the task lighting, it might be good to tone it down some in order to enjoy the meal better. On a similar note, you might want the power to turn the lighting down in order to take a relaxing bath, but also have bright options when getting ready in the morning.

Dressing room and bathroom mirrors also need task lighting. You won’t feel as attractive if you have lighting casting unforgiving shadows on different parts of your face. On top of that, it’s just harder to see just what you’re doing. Placing lights evenly around the mirror is a good way to remedy that issue instead of just having a single light shining down from up above.

Read more: Dreamy Bathroom Lighting Ideas: From Drab to Fab

Get The General Lighting Just Right

General lighting, also known as ambiance lighting, since it refers to the type of lighting filling any given space. It’s not specific about what gets illuminated, because those jobs fall to accent and/or task lighting. General lighting might just be the most essential kind of light, though, since the other kinds of light don’t work nearly as well without it.

General lighting doesn’t have to be so very bright that you have rooms lit up like sports stadiums. You can definitely fill space with harsh fluorescent lights; then again, you’ll also obliterate the room’s chances at ambiance in doing so. Your bedrooms, dining room, and lounge all need a sufficient amount of non-harsh general lighting.

It’s likely a lot more obvious to you now how paying attention to the lighting quality of your property will help you be more successful with your renovations.

Written by Kukun. May 26, 2019