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Let There Be Light: Light Up Your Living Room with These 5 Hacks

Light Up Your Living Room with These 5 Hacks

You know how professional decorators say that focal points are the most significant things in the room? Well, if you apply that to the bigger picture, you’ll understand that living rooms represent the focal point of your whole house. That being said, the place that’s in the center of attention, where you spend most of your time and the place you use to spend quality time with your friends and family, deserves special attention. And what’s a better way to give a room that special something than to shower it with some light? Lighting plays a major role in interior design and these few tips will give you a proper insight on how to light up your living room accordingly.

Create the Perfect Ambiance

A living room should always radiate with a certain kind of emotion; it needs to exude warmth, hospitality and an overall inviting atmosphere. This is where ambient lighting comes in. The sole goal of this lighting system is to create a suitable environment to dwell in and it accomplishes this through the use of stylish chandeliers, valance lighting, ceiling lights as well as recessed lights. There’s a wide array of ambient lights available and all you have to do is choose the style according to the style of your living room.

Light Up Your Living Room with These 5 Hacks

Accentuate Certain Features

After you set the right mood, the next step is giving your living room a bit of structure. The best way to achieve this is by using accent lighting in order to put the focus on specific elements in the room. In most cases, accent lighting is used to illuminate certain architectural features, artistic elements, as well as specific areas and places in the room. In order for this type of lighting to be effective, it needs to be much brighter than surrounding lights, which is why adjustable lights and dimmers always go hand in hand.

Light Up Your Living Room with These 5 Hacks

Give It a Dose of Charm

Lighting features aren’t used solely for providing sufficient amounts of light, but also to give your room a specific dose of charm. Lamps are often used as decorative objects, which is why a stylish floor or table lamp always finds a way into a living space, while an extravagant chandelier usually makes a nice addition. Pendant lights are also quite a favorable choice when thinking about embellishing the room and you can always decide to add a bit of color by choosing bulbs in different hues.

Don’t Ignore Your Tasks

Every living room needs to have a designated reading nook. Sometimes, these spaces that are reserved solely for reading, painting or any similar activity, require brighter lighting. This is why proper lighting is a very important part of these small areas in the living room and it’s also the reason why task lighting exists. These are mostly adjustable lamps with LED bulbs which give you a direct light source and help you get a clear visual of the task in front of you.

Light Up Your Living Room with These 5 Hacks

Helpful Details

There are other significant aspects of lighting up a room that need to be considered. First of all, it’s important to know a good emergency electrician who’s competent enough to handle the entire electrical system in the house. Second, the type of bulb is an important aspect of proper lighting and in recent years, LED bulbs have become much more favorable than traditional, incandescent bulbs. The last thing to keep in mind is the importance of natural lighting and possible solutions on how to introduce more sunshine in your home.

Light Up Your Living Room with These 5 Hacks

With so many different lighting systems and options, sometimes it can be difficult to achieve a desired atmosphere in the living room. The goal is to learn how to consolidate all these different lighting options into one entirety and create a soothing and balanced setting.

 

 

 

Most popular home lighting mistakes

Appropriate lighting in a home is very important for both functionality and aesthetics. Unfortunately, trying to get the lighting right in your house can be a very complicated task, because the light can turn out to be too bright, too dark or in wrong color temperature. Also the light fixtures themselves can look inappropriate or odd in your space. So to make it a little easier for you to choose the lighting for your home, here are some of the most popular lighting mistakes that you should never make.

Most popular home lighting mistakes

Installing only overhead (ambient) lighting

Most people choose to install only ambient lighting in their homes, but interior designers recommend using three different types of lighting – ambient, accent and task lighting. Ambient lighting is the one that gives overall light to the room, and it is usually achieved by placing one or multiple overhead light fixtures all over the room. Accent lighting is used to emphasize some specific characteristics of a house for example, shelves, paintings or other wall decor. But task lighting is lights that are used to perform specific tasks, for example, it can be a desk lamp for doing paperwork or a nightlight next to your bed for reading. And combining these three types of lights will ensure sufficient lighting for everything and anything.

Most popular home lighting mistakes

Choosing the wrong light for the coloring of your rooms

What many people don’t know is that you should match your light to the colors in your interior, because colors of your walls and other design elements can severely change how you perceive the color of your lighting.

Black color absorbs light, but white reflects it light, blue color absorbs the red tones, but red – the blues. And that means that white-yellow light, which will have the color temperature of around 3,000 Kelvins, will make red, orange, and yellow tones more vivid in your interior, while blue-white colored light (with the color temperature around 6,500 Kelvins) will enhance the blues and the greens, but will mute warmer tones. So, depending on what mood you want to create in your space, you should choose the appropriate color of your light sources.

Using wrong color temperature lights

The color temperature of a light source also often is chosen wrongly. Beside the lamp itself, there are many factors that can determine the appropriate light color temperature for each room, for example, the dimensions of the space, the owner’s preferences and the feel that the owner is going for in their home. On top of that, each room also has different lighting needs and expectations, and you should consider all of this before you pick up your light bulbs.

How to figure out what type of color temperature lights will work best for you? Well the easiest way to do this is to figure out if you want your room to feel bright and awake, or you want a more cozy vibe in your space. If the former is true, then buy blue-white bulbs, but if you like your house warm and homey, then chose warm-white bulbs, that will help you achieve that.

Most popular home lighting mistakes

Installing the wrong size light fixtures

It is very important to choose appropriate size light fixtures to keep the balance in your space. Light fixtures that are too small for your space, like recessed lights or small accent lights can create a very cheap look, to your room, if they aren’t used correctly. At the same time, lamps that are too big, like solar outdoor lights or big chandeliers can make your room look disproportional.

The best method how to choose appropriate size light fixtures, so they look good in your space as well as provide enough illumination, is by creating a simple cardboard light model and hanging it up, because this way you will be able to see if it fits in the rooms interior or not.

Not thinking about wattage of your lights

Lastly, most people simply doesn’t consider how much watts their lighting uses to light each room and end up with huge electricity bills. So to solve this, you should first figure out what is the optimal brightness of light in each room in your home, and then buy your light bulbs according to these requirements. For example, you don’t usually need that bright of a light in your bedroom, so 800 lumen bulbs will provide enough illumination. But for your living room you should go for around 1,600 lumen output lights, because they will ensure that you have sufficient lighting to perform different everyday tasks.

But where does wattage comes in? Well, wattage is the thing you need to consider once you know what brightness bulbs you need. And it will come into play when you will be choosing between incandescent, fluorescent or LED bulbs, because each of these bulbs consumes different amount of watts while producing the same amount of light. For example, both a 100-watt incandescent and 16-watt LED bulbs will produce enough light to illuminate your living room. So you chose which type of light you want to buy.

Proper lighting in your home means that not only it will be lot easier to do different tasks because you will have sufficient lighting, but also that your home will have the right atmosphere. So no matter if you are designing a brand new lighting setup or just want to tweak your existing lighting situation, take some time to read these home lighting mistakes and to think about how to make sure that you are not making them in your house.

 
Authors bio: Arthur Smith is a blogger, efficient lighting enthusiast and solar power aficionado. He has been working in the lighting and solar industries for most of his life, and now shares his knowledge on these topics in his blog LEDwatcher.com.

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