Improve Your Curb Appeal with Upgraded Outdoor Lighting

If you've ever pulled up in front of a home with a Realtor, you might have heard a comment (or made a comment) about the home's “curb appeal.”

A home with great curb appeal is visually alluring from the street, meaning that it looks well maintained, with a color scheme, window treatments and landscaping that blend together to create an attractive, panoramic picture. Perhaps no feature heightens a home's curb appeal more than outdoor lighting, which can bathe a home in a soft glow while providing a sense of safety and security.

Upgraded outdoor lighting can enhance your home's value and enable you to ratchet up your asking price if your home is up for sale, according to a report by the National Association of Realtors.

Even if you have no plans to sell your home, upgrading your outdoor lighting can improve your home's curb appeal and swell the natural pride you feel when you pull up in the driveway at the end of a good day but especially after a difficult one and think to yourself, “Yes indeed, it feels good to be home.”

Experts In Your Home Pairs Objectives with Technique

Upgrading outdoor lighting is one of those creative and rewarding home improvement projects that works best as a team effort between homeowners and the Chico area electricians at Experts In Your Home. By collaborating, exchanging ideas and finessing the details, we always end up with more than a new picture of your home; we end up with a masterpiece.

The process begins with your budget and objectives and then emphasizes two considerations: lighting techniques and lighting styles. Right from the start, we caution homeowners that less is more with outdoor lighting. This objective is rather simple to attain with pathway lighting, where too many lights can make steps, walkways and sidewalks resemble an airport runway. Many homeowners gravitate to the moonlighting technique, in which low-watt lights are placed up high and pointed downward to mimic the effect of a full moon, with beautiful shadows and intense highlights.

Experts In Your Home shed light on other outdoor lighting techniques in a previous article, “Types of outdoor lighting an electrician can install.” These techniques include:

• Down-lighting from a roof line, garden walls or trees to train a circle of light on sidewalks, walkways, flower beds and other focal points. The higher the light is positioned, the smaller the circle.
• Uplighting, which relies on ground-based, low-voltage fixtures to showcase the shape and structure of tree trunks and the canopy of tree branches.
• Shadowing , which is achieved when a tree or statue is lit so that its form casts an intriguing shadow on a nearby wall or fence.
• Silhouetting, in which a spread light is placed between a plant, sculpture or fountain and an adjacent structure so that the object is silhouetted in black against a soft white background.

Consider Your Lighting Options

As we begin to put together a picture of what your home will look like with upgraded outdoor lighting, we seek your opinion on the six most popular types of outdoor lighting:

• Entrance lights, which provide illumination along walks and driveways
• Floodlights, which send out a strong beam (sometimes triggered by a motion sensor) and are particularly well suited to back doors and garages for security purposes
• Globe lights, which provide general lighting without glare
• Mushroom lights, which refer to fixtures in which the source of the light is hidden (like under a mushroom cap) to create a soft glow
• Tier lights, which often is used along borders for a soft, decorative accent
• Well lights, which send light beams upward to accent trees, shrubs and facades

Your Learning Curve Continues

Creating a masterpiece is never a one-day process, and Experts In Your Home electricians give you plenty of time to mull your outdoor lighting plan before installing it. We also give you a few helpful pointers to think about along the way, such as: Vary the lighting fixtures for maximum visual appeal. Make the most of highlighting trees; they don't have to be towering giants to create stunning illumination. Orchestrate your lighting with timers so that, for example, all but security lights shut off at midnight. Combine beauty and function, remembering that light pointed upward is more visually interesting than light pointed downward. If upgrading your outdoor lighting sounds like fun, just think: you're only getting started. And with our Expert electricians at your side, we'll truly trip the light fantastic.