Properly lighting a home’s exterior and landscaping is about more than placing a few light posts here and there. Founder of AK Lighting Adam Keeler shares the top five outdoor lighting mistakes.
One of the biggest pitfalls Keeler sees people make is using too little light so that it doesn’t make that much of an impact. Although it is possible to go overboard, Keeler says not using enough lighting is a waste of material and labor.
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Another error to avoid is lighting only the ground-level of a home. “When you light up a second-story, that's what really grabs people's attention because it looks so good,” Keeler says. “If you only light up half the house, the bottom half will look really good and then the top will just look forgotten [and] kind of empty.”
Watch the video to learn more.
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Transcript: “Landscape Lighting design mistakes - most common designing mistakes you don't want to make”
Hello, and welcome back to another video of this series of the top 5 mistakes that you will probably make and that I have made, and these are the top 5 mistakes of designing your landscape lighting. If you are interested in doing your own landscape lighting, this is a must-see video so you can avoid these mistakes. With that being said I'm gonna jump right into the video.
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Don’t skimp out on the lights
Number 1 is putting too few lights. I see this way too often where people decide to either scrimp and save their money and not put in the right amount of lights to make their house look absolutely amazing. For instance, one time I went out and designed someone's home. It really didn't need a lot of lights. I think it was around 12 lights, and then when I came back, and they said well you know it looks really good with 12 lights. I liked the idea, but is it okay if we go with three, and I was so confused about how you go from 12 to 3. And why did you even have me come out go get three lights of your own and just put them in because three lights is hardly any. Your house is not gonna look good and that kind of attitude is what I'm talking about. If you want your house to be designed correctly, you need to actually put the right amount of lights. Now there are some homes that have an overkill of the amount of lights like there are some homes that I have seen. Like you see here in this picture that this tree, it's not even that big, has four lights, there's no need to put four lights on one tree, especially that small. I mean if it was absolutely ginormous I could see that. But one tree with four lights, that's too much. That's overkill. But most of the time people don't do that so make sure you put enough lights.
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Light up the home’s exterior and outdoor landscaping
Now mistake number two is not lighting up both the house, and the landscape. So some people think that landscape lighting is just for the landscaping, and they'll exclude the house. Now this happens a lot more than you think, and maybe you're one of those people who think that. I want to let you know now: don't think that way. You need to light up both, and as you can see in these pictures when you look at how bad it looks just lighting up the landscaping. The house is dark and doesn't feel very inviting but then on the flip side if you only light up the house.
See the full transcript here.
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