Redecorating your home, done right, can make for a lovely weekend: cheap but productive, healthy but not exhausting, and relaxing yet still engaging your mind. What and how you want to redecorate will depend on your specific home and your tastes. If you are looking for ideas to do with lighting your home, read on.
Mirrors and bright walls are your friends
It can be easy not to notice if part of your house feels darker than the rest if you have adjusted to it. To find out if there are any dark spots in your house one easy test is to quickly go around turning on al the lights, then walk through the house carefully reading a book with normal size text, keeping aware of dangers like cats, and not reading while near stairs. If you find you have to squint in any one particular spot, you may need better lighting there, or just brighter lights.
A good first stop is to consider the colour of the walls in that spot. Dark paint and carpets can gobble up light. If the change in lighting feels abrupt you may consider repainting that area to ensure that there is sufficient brightness in that part of the house. Hanging a mirror to get light in from a nearby lighter area, for example next to a window, can also have a positive effect, without requiring you to change up the room or corridor’s entire colour scheme. Mirrors can also create a more spacious airy feeling due to the brightness they bring, as well as looking aesthetic on the walls.
Invest in the right lights for you
If you want the parts of your house to have a cohesive sense of identity it can be worth investing in slightly nicer, stylised lighting fixtures. Wall lights are a great addition to your living room and offer a huge variety of character you can choose to go with for your home.
Do you want brass, retro fixtures to go with a wood-burning stove? Or would sleek curved wall lights go better with the more modern look that has been created in the room, with television as a centre-point and smooth leather sofas? Every house will be different and have different best fit requirements. Wall lights can also be very useful in other rooms of the house, most especially the bedrooms.
Choice of lightbulbs
When you next have a chance to redecorate it is worth going around your whole house looking at each light fitting and working out whether or not you are using energy saving light bulbs. These now come in several varieties, and it is not hard to see why: halogen light bulbs, if you are still using them, waste 90% of their energy as heat.
The calculated saving per normal energy saving bulb can add up to £3 a year, meaning the average home could save £45 a year by changing away from old-fashioned halogen bulbs. For an even greater saving it is well-worth considering new LED bulbs, which can cut energy bills by 90%, and look just as good as the old kind, in any lamp fitting or wall light.
Open up your rooms
While this may be a little bit more than simply redecorating, have you considered how your doors impact the environment inside your room? A closed door, without any form of window within its frame, is essentially a temporary wall that lets no light in or out. Consider whether you need your door to be there at all, if it’s an internal passageway only. If the room in question does get particularly cold, or is private (a bedroom, for instance), then this won’t work – but elsewhere in the home it could be a great solution.
Naturally, by simply removing a door you’ll be left with an empty doorway, which isn’t ideal – but you could only be a quick chat with a builder and half a day’s work from turning your opaque doorway into an open and spacious archway instead. When combined with the other elements we’ve already covered, above, you’ll have a gloriously illuminating setup throughout the home, with lots of natural light flowing from room to room and mirror to mirror.
This could also, in its own way, help you to reduce your energy bills in the process. For instance, let’s say you open up your living room to the hallway, you will rarely need to have the main light on in both places at all times. Instead, you could have your hallway light on, and a couple of lamps in the living room, creating a cosy space to relax in, while stealing a little bit of light from the hallway outside in the process. With the variety of options available for adding a little extra light in your rooms, try them and out and see what works best for you and the people you live with.
