Landscape lighting offers a low-cost way to quickly enhance your home’s curb appeal and create a more inviting landscape for yourself and your family to enjoy. Outdoor lighting in your yard follows rules similar to lighting your home’s interior, but it uses different types of lights.
While outdoor lighting focuses on practicality, incorporating stylish elements like a black lamp floor in patio or deck areas can add elegance and a touch of interior sophistication to your outdoor space.
Three Types of Lighting
Although many types of lights exist, they’re all used within three categories or types of lighting, according to HGTV. Inside and out, every home needs:
- Ambient lighting – general lighting that provides illumination to an entire area or room, such as your porch light
- Task lighting – lighting for a specific area to ensure it receives illumination for its typical task, such as a hanging light over your backyard grill
- Accent lighting – lights that chase away shadows, such as string lights.
Before you launch your landscape lighting installation project, explore the types of lights that fit into each category of lighting.
Make a List of Yard Uses and Areas
A list of areas to address can make lighting your yard easier. Perhaps you wish you could use the yard after dark to practice a sport with your child or to enjoy reading a book on your deck. Add these intended uses to your list. The typical yard includes:
- Porchlight
- Garage light
- Deck lights
- Step lights
- Path lights
- Driveway lights
- Yard lights.
Each area needs a different type of light. For example, your porch light resembles an interior light and uses the same type of bright bulb you use in your kitchen or living room overhead light. To light the yard, you’d use floodlights.
Types of Lights to Use in Your Yard
Lighting the yard enhances your use of it, so adding ambient, task, and accent lighting provides you with added hours of enjoyment of your personal landscape. Proper yard lighting improves the landscaping, according to This Old House, and that enhances the curb appeal of your home, an important factor if you want to sell your home. Consider using the following types of lights in your lighted landscape:
- Wash lights
- Bullet lights
- Floodlights
- Well lights
- Downlights
- Step lights
- Stake lights
- String lights
- Garden lights
- Bollard lights
- Decorative lights.
Most landscaping projects use five or more of these light types.
Uses of Various Light Types
According to Designing Idea, wash, bullet, flood, well, and downlight devices accent the yard’s features, such as a decorative eave on the home or a spectacular tree. Step lights illuminate each step leading into the yard and up to the front door of the home, making it easier to see where you’re going.
Bollard lights typically mark the sides of the driveway as you turn into it, while stake lights illuminate its borders and those of any yard paths, although well lights can serve that purpose, too. Garden lights dot the yard’s gardens to light its plantings, while decorative lights simply entertain the senses, such as colorful holiday lights on a tree.
Getting Started on Your Outdoor Lighting Improvements
Don’t tackle your Raleigh landscape lighting project alone. Hire a landscaping lighting firm that specializes in outdoor lighting design. This type of landscaping and lighting professional can create a lighting plan for your yard and home exterior that maximizes its utility and curb appeal, increasing your home’s personal and fiscal value.
