How to Choose the Best Outdoor Lighting to Complement Your Home

When it comes to your Residential Outdoor Lighting, leave nothing to chance. The lighting around the home has many purposes and benefits and installing the wrong lights or creating an insufficient design scheme can have a significant impact on the ability of your lights to do their job properly.

So we’re going to go over some of the most important outdoor lighting tips that you need to remember so you can make the best choices to complement the home and help keep you and your family safe at all times.

Whether you plan to install the lighting yourself or hire a professional installer to come in and do the work for you, this is a job you should only have to do once. You don’t want to put together an outdoor lighting scheme and have all of the fixtures placed only to realize you have left some dark spots or need to replace some of your initial choices because they are insufficient to properly illuminate the exterior of the home and all of the most important elements in your yard.

So, let’s look at the factors that play a role to help you choose the best outdoor lighting to complement your home and everything surrounding it.

Walk Around

You might think you know the exterior of your property well enough, but take a good long look at the home and the landscaping all around it before you decide on any lighting options. You need to do this for two reasons: find the areas that are potentially dangerous to navigate in the dark and pinpoint any features that you want to spotlight after the sun goes down to boost your home’s curb appeal.

Safety

For the first of those factors we’ve named above, safety should be of the utmost importance when you are designing the right outdoor lighting for the home. You don’t want yourself or any member of your family or invited guests taking a bad fall simply because there was little to no visibility around the house.

This could occur along walkways, driveways, front or back steps, even your patio or deck. So, it’s critical to find all of the areas where someone could trip and hurt themselves in the dark. Make a note of these locations and decide on the best types of fixtures to reduce those risks through sufficient lighting.

Curb Appeal

Next, make a list of the features around the outside that you want to spotlight in the dark. You might have a particularly large tree that can look even more grandiose and dramatic with the right lighting, maybe some landscaping that could benefit from a few additional fixtures. Perhaps the home itself has certain architectural flourishes that you desperately want to show off to passersby.

Make a note of all these things as you will want to illuminate them for the best possible exposure when it gets dark out. Just be careful you don’t bathe the home and your yard in too much light. That could defeat the purpose of spotlighting your favorite features and it could bother your neighbors next door.