General Guidelines for a Home Lighting Plan

Lighting can make a major impact on your home’s environment. Good lighting makes it easier to see and carry out tasks. In addition, it affects your emotions, as it offers a sense of comfort, security and safety. Having different kinds of lighting enables you to change the ambiance and atmosphere of the home. Lighting fixtures can be used as accessories to enhance your home’s overall interior design. These fixtures come in a wide range of colors, sizes, styles and shapes.

If you are carrying out major renovations or constructing a new home, having a lighting plan is very important. A well-done plan will enable you to have lighting that suits your needs perfectly.

At the onset of planning, examine all the rooms in your home and ask yourself these following questions:

• What will each room be used for? Consider all the possible uses of the room. For instance, your kitchen could also double up as your dining area. The sitting room could also be used as a study area or even a studio.
• What ambience or mood would you want to create in each room?
• What would you want to display? Is there a particular plant or painting you’d like to draw attention to? This will determine if you’ll need to use accent lighting.
• What decorative or architectural elements do you wish to highlight?
• At what time of the day will the room be most used?
• Who will use the room? Usually, older people require more light for reading.
• From which direction does natural light enter the room?

While looking at each room individually, you also need to consider the general feel of your home. After considering these questions, you can then lay out the lighting plan for your home.

• Draw out a sketch of your room on a piece of paper and decide where you want to position your lights.
• Identify rooms which have dark wall finishes and colors. Such walls absorb a lot of light and might therefore need to be repainted with lighter finishes.
• Take note of fixtures which cannot be moved such as doors, fireplaces, windows and alcoves.
• Think about the direction people in a room would possibly be facing. For instance, people in a living room are likely to face the television.
• Identify the existing sockets in the house. If they are insufficient, you might end up with overloaded plugs.
• Determine where you will position heavy furniture such as beds and sofas.
• Think about where light switches will be positioned; make sure the switches are placed on the right side of the door.
• Do you want to operate all your lights independently or would you like to operate them using a single switch? Are you planning to use dimmers? It is advisable to have not more than three lights in each room, with all of them being operated from a wall-mounted panel.
• Consider some practicalities:  for example, how will the bulb be changed? This is an important consideration, especially if a room has a very high ceiling!

Charles often writes about tips for home improvement. At the moment, he is contributing to a blog that profiles different types of LED grow lights.