Three Easy Ways to Improve Your Indoor Lighting

Many factors go into the aesthetic appeal of a space. Colors, lines, and patterns are all defined by what occupies a space, and that means it’s critical to find things that work together. When it comes to decorating your home, however, there is another factor that radically influences the look of any area of your home: lighting. Lighting accentuates features you want to draw attention to while also creating the subtle depth that is necessary to make a room really pop. Lighting can make features and fixtures look their best, and it can also greatly bring down the beauty of a space if it isn’t up to a high enough standard of quality.

However, did you know that improving your lighting doesn’t have to be a monumental undertaking? In fact, you can improve the lighting in your home with just a few small and subtle changes—some of which might actually save you money on your energy bills!

Increase Brightness Without Increasing Wattage

The intensity of your lighting is one of the biggest influencers over the mood or feel of a space. Quieter spaces like libraries and studies often benefit from milder and softer light while highly-used spaces with a lot of activities often do better with brighter and more welcoming light. This is why selecting the proper bulb for a particular fixture is so important. A bulb that is too dark makes a room feel cramped and unwelcoming while a blub that is too bright can be harsh on the eyes, causing strain. It’s important to choose a bulb that has the proper brightness and intensity for every application.

However, another one of the biggest decisions to make today is the type of bulb you use. Incandescent lightbulbs are still around, but are rapidly becoming a thing of the past due to their immense energy consumption and general lack of flexibility. Compact fluorescent lightbulbs are growing in popularity for high-usage lights due to their bright white color and far lower energy consumption. However, the true leader in modern technology is the LED lightbulb. LEDs come in a variety of colors, brightnesses, shapes, and styles, meaning you can find a bulb for virtually any application. These bulbs offer a significant increase in light output and brightness, but use a significantly smaller amount of energy. That way you can increase the amount of light in a space without actually increasing the amount of energy consumed to do so.

Use a Brighter White Temperature

Light brightness is one factor in good lighting, but it isn’t the only factor. Another major consideration is the color of the light in your room, and different types of bulbs will emit different shades of white light. Traditionally, incandescent lightbulbs have always emitted more of a softer white or yellowish glow by the nature of the fact that the light comes from a filament glowing extremely hot. In some cases, this is still the preferred type of light used in homes. However, LED and CFL technology have given us the ability to artificially create bulbs that mirror the color of bright, natural sunlight. Sunlight is generally a purer white color, looking cooler and almost even having a blueish tint to it in the opinion of some people. These bulbs are fantastic for filling a room with even more light without sacrificing on energy efficiency or even changing anything else about a particular light fixture. By flooding a room with a brighter and purer white, you can accentuate your design choices and eliminate darker spots, thus making your home feel and look better.

Move Furniture to Allow Light to Fill a Space

Finally, you might be surprised to learn that your light fixtures might not be the biggest issue impacting your indoor lighting—it might be the things located around a light. Furniture blocks light and can sometimes redirect it to areas of your room you aren’t looking for. For example, if you use a standing lamp, placing it in the corner surrounded by a bookshelf and an armoire is going to prevent the majority of the light from actually reaching your room, even if you can see the light clearly from the majority of the space. Because a good chunk of the light will have to bounce off of the furniture and then off the walls in order to reach the rest of your room, it will lose a good chunk of its intensity, thus making your room feel dark.

This is a common issue with a lot of bedrooms, where ceiling fixtures are not necessarily the most common. Having a ceiling fan with a light fixture can help with this problem tremendously, but spaces without a fan and light should pay close attention to where their light fixtures are located and what might be preventing them from properly lighting an area. A simple furniture rearrangement could do wonders for improving light quality.