How to Highlight Your Living Room’s Décor

Lighting, when properly place in your living room, can dramatically enhance the décor of the room. Lighting can be used to display artwork, plants, and furniture and just about anything else you wish to display. This how to article will give you some creative ideas in bringing out the best in your living room. This project may require that you have an electrician install additional wall fixtures, switches and outlets.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

1. For ambient lighting in your living room, you can use a combination of floor lamps, overhead fixtures, table lamps and wall mounting fixtures.
2. Carefully plan out in your living room where you want to place your lighting to highlight a painting, plants, bookcase, collectables or anything else you wish to highlight.
3. If you need additional ambient lighting in certain areas of your living room, consider using translucent lamp shades instead of opaque.
4. Showcase books and collectibles that are in a book case or entertainment center with small fluorescent or halogen strip lighting.
5. To highlight art work, use picture lighting. For large floor plants use small floor lighting to highlight upward or recess lights to highlight downward.
6. When positioning accent lighting, make sure that lights won’t shine into people’s eyes when they are seated on the couch or love seat.
7. Consider purchasing light dimmers for lamps and wall lights to lower room light for watching television and when you don’t want a bright living room.
8. One last suggestion is to consider making your room appear more spacious. This is accomplished by lighting an entire wall with wall-washers. These are fixtures that are mounted on the wall an equal distance away from each other.

Tips & Warnings

• To get some ideas go to your local library and take out some magazines on home decor. You can get some great ideas from these magazines.