Use lighting to showcase your home for a quick sale
New ideas in decorative lighting make it easy and affordable to add visual interest to room interiors when you are considering options in preparation for putting your home on the market. Not only is there a huge variety of exciting choices in lamps and fixtures, there are also interesting new ideas in lighting strategies.
Basic lighting tips to remember when selling a home
- Recessed fixtures in bathrooms, angled to bounce light off ceilings and walls, helps reduce glare and shadow.
- If a room is too small you can achieve a feeling of expansiveness by washing one of the walls with light.
- If a room is too narrow you can visually broaden it by illuminating the wide sides of the room.
- Simply replacing some of the most prominent fixtures in your home is a quick and easy way to modernize the look of an interior - leading to a higher sale price.
- Most fixtures typically run around $50 a piece and are available in an abundance of styles, materials and finishes.
- Don’t forget the importance of natural light in illuminating an interior - there is nothing more inviting or mood elevating than a room bathed in sunlight.
- A strategically placed skylight can brighten a dark hallway or add an unexpected feeling of airiness to a small space like a shower stall or mudroom.
Selecting the right interior lighting can mean the difference between a room with atmosphere and ease of function and one with uncomfortably harsh light or light so drab it lowers the mood and, at the worst, makes it hard to perform simple tasks.
When installing new fixtures or deciding on the placement of lamps, lighting experts suggest that you will want to consider how many lighting sources to use in relation to the size of the room, where to locate them for aesthetic affect and task orientation, and what the proper wattages should be.
More tips to follow for using light to help lead a quick sale of your home
- For most rooms, the proper illumination is determined by multiplying the square footage of the room by 1.5. For example, a room with 150 square feet of space needs 225 watts of lighting. For an area that requires concentrated light such as a workshop or kitchen island, multiply the square footage of the workspace by 2.5.
- To determine the correct size of a chandelier for a room, add the length and width of the room in feet then reduce the sum to inches. In the case of a 10’ by 12’ room, the sum of the dimensions is 22 feet. Reducing that figure to inches results in a room that requires a chandelier that is 22 inches in diameter.
- If a room has an 8-foot ceiling, suspend a chandelier over the dining table so that the bottom of the fixture is 30 inches above the tabletop. For every additional foot of ceiling height, add another 3 inches to the distance between fixture and tabletop. The diameter of the chandelier should be half that of the table.
- Wall sconces should be installed 60 inches above the floor. In hallways they should be 8 to10 feet apart.
Source: © Alice Dahlgren's AtHome Newsletter
