Green Blog

Lighting is the one, single most critical means of altering the mood of any room. Therefore, it stands to reason that if you enhance the lighting and appearance of your house, its value will also rise. Lighting improves any decor. However, you do not have to use expensive lighting, budget or discount light is just as good in most cases.

There are thousands of kinds of lighting, at least one of which will go well with the type of decor that you have. Lighting is best kept subtle. Up lighting, down lighting and back lighting are fantastic ways of lighting up objects in a room. The days of one pendant lamp hanging from a rose in the centre of the ceiling are long gone so if you do have to have one, at least put a dimmer on it.

Using many lights in place of one powerful light does not have to be more expensive. Typically, the one powerful light was a 100 watt bulb, so you could have four 20 watt wall lights and still save 20% on electricity. Or you could use one 40 watt bulb in a standard floor lamp or table lamp for reading or working and save 60% on your lighting bill.

Apart from the savings, a wrought iron floor or table lamp is far more beautiful that a pendant light. How about candelabra? You could use candelabra to stunning effect, whether you use candles in them or small light bulbs.

Candles have made a big comeback too. Many people use candles for supplementary or even back-up lighting and candelabra are one of the hottest latest trends. Interior designers are buying them up antique shops and painting them bright colours. You can see them in the photos of the houses of many celebrities. A lot of people use candelabra in conjunction with aromatherapy too.

Another aspect of lighting is security. A well-lit house is less likely to be burgled than a dark house. Outside lighting can also play a major role in security precautions. External lighting that is controlled by movement or heating sensors to switch them on are the best means of discouraging burglars.

External lighting is the best deterrent, but it can also be beautiful. Back or up lighting on a water fall, a pond or a striking arrangement of plants or bushes is stunning in the dark. Spotlights have a role to play in lighting up garden plants as well.

If you want to give your fish free, organic meat to eat, put a floodlight or even an ultraviolet light at the pond side. If you switch it on for a few hours after dusk, hundreds of flies, moths and mosquitoes will be drawn to it and fall into the water, where your fish will be waiting for them.

You can have a lot of fun with lighting and the possibilities are infinite. Both indoor and outdoor lighting can increase the beauty of your home and garden, but they also have functional uses: they enable you to see what you are doing and what other people are doing, which is why they are a good deterrent. Good lighting also makes anyone living alone feel more secure.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece writes on several topics, but is at present involved with researching wrought iron floor lamps. If you would like to know more or check out great offers, please go to our website at Wrought Iron Light

If you have just moved into a new, old house, one of the first things that you will probably want to do is refurbish or remodel the kitchen, especially if you like cooking or spending a lot of time in the kitchen. If you use a kitchen a great deal, you will probably already have a good idea of what you would like the kitchen to look like in the end.

One of the first decisions to make is whether you are going to do it yourself or oversee it yourself. There is a lot of work in a kitchen makeover and I have seen amateurs spend years, literally years, doing what a professional could have completed in weeks. This always leads to family tensions. Once that I know of, it even led to divorce. It seems that everybody wants to boast that they are having refurbishments done, but no one actually wants to go through the hassle of having it actually done.

If you are not completely sure what you want your kitchen to look like, it is a good suggestion to visit show kitchens in home improvement stores and even pick up brochures there to study at home. You could also buy a few magazines and surf the Internet for ideas.

Once you see a few examples that you like, be sure to cut out the pages and print off the image files after downloading them. This way you can build up a dossier of the things that you would like to integrate into your new kitchen..

Once you are pleased that you have all the components you like, you have to collate them. This does not have to be to scale or exact, but just as good as you can do with what you have. Take a large sheet of paper, say A3, and draw in your kitchen’s windows and doors.

Then cut out the pictures of the items you want from the magazines and brochures and stick them in place. If you think that this is not realistic, draw them in and label them clearly so that you can refer back to your picture file.

You need not stop at one design, you can play about with it. If you cut the pictures out, but do not stick them down, you can move them around until you are happy. You may also want to get the opinions of other members of the family and have a brain storming session

When you have finished, decide how you are going to illuminate the kitchen. Do you want a hanging light over the table? Do you want spots pointing at the cooker and the sink? Do you want hidden down-lighting to shine on the work surface? How are you going to see what you are doing? It is a very important question. Wall lights are great for ambient lighting.

In conclusion, you have to choose a colour scheme and you are almost ready to start, unless you are using a contractor and then you will have to select one first, but that will make up the contents of another article.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article writes on several topics, but is at present involved with researching wrought iron floor lamps. If you would like to know more or check out great offers, please go to our website at Wrought Iron Light