Guest Blogger: How to Achieve Affordable & Inspiring Lighting for your Home

 Guest Blogger #272, Entry #786, November 28, 2011

Last week, guest blogger Saeema posted about creative home lighting, and now I’m here to explore how you can get great lighting for next to nothing. In fact, a lot of these ideas will have you ’doing-it-yourself’.

If you’ve ever taken on a DIY project, you probably figured that it would be cheaper, more fun, more beautiful, or more unique than buying something in a store. In other words, you could have a whole bunch of reasons for taking on the DIY route, and this holds true for the grand project of getting great lighting in your house. In this blog post, you can expect a few ideas that you’ll be able to adapt for your own use. Heck, you might even find something you fall in love with. But whatever happens, I hope you’ll be inspired to find ways to get great lighting in your home – for cheap.

Lighting can change an entire space

Image via: Interior Factors

Good lighting in a home depends on a few basic principles.

First and foremost, don’t use more light than you need

Kitchens, desks and other task-oriented areas need the most light, but the whole house doesn’t need to be just as bright (unless you really want a headache). Along those lines, here are a few ways to get more efficiency and brightness in the spots you need it:

Change the ambiance of a room with creative lighting

 Image via: Michael J Dove

LED lights are super bright and highly directional, which means they’re a perfect fit for recessed and spot-lighting applications. Like the photo above demonstrates, they’re great for bathrooms – over showers, baths, sinks or more. These days, LED lights come pre-made, so the difficulty and cost of this upgrade won’t put you off at all.

Task lighting is perfect in the kitchen

Image via: Instructables

This tutorial will show you how to replace buzzing, terribly unpleasant under-counter kitchen lighting with super-efficient LED lights. They’re about 90% more efficient than incandescent bulbs, and even more efficient than fluorescents and CFCs.

The second principle is all about aesthetics

Once lighting does the task you set it to, you can go about making it beautiful. Here are a few neat options:

Creative lighting option

Image via: Instructables

Upcycling, repurposing and recycling:

Upcycling is the art of taking junk and making it into something new. This tutorial shows you how to make a chandelier out of throwaway bike parts, and it’s no eyesore either.

The art of handcrafting your own light fixtures gets a creative boost from new materials too. Start out with a simple, hanging pendant lamp and see how creative you can get!

Handcrafted lighting ideas

Image via: Craftynest

Hemp string is a crafting staple, and it’s used in this tutorial to make gorgeous lamps for next to nothing. The trick is to wrap the twine around a re-inflatable ball. Once it sets, deflate the ball and make another. By the end of a weekend you’d have enough lamps for the whole house.

Unique lighting ideas for your home

Image via: Femtalks

This bubble chandelier is a lot of work – look at all the twirling and looping involved – but it only costs $75 for a stunning and unique lighting piece[j1] .

Outdoor lighting

And if there’s a final principle, it’s that you shouldn’t ignore any part of your house, especially the outdoors! Great lighting can happen anywhere. The holiday season is right around the corner, and lots of energy-efficient fun can be had if you trade in your old incandescent lights for new LED ones. And if you really want to step it up, take a cue from this creative use of addressable LED lights:

Youtube – Outdoor lighting idea

Andrew is a community coordinator at ApplianceHelp.com, an online retailer of appliance parts and a great resource for DIY appliance repair

For more lighting ideas on Stagetecture, click here.