My inspiring blog 9822

Landscape lighting starts with the yard, not the catalog Where roofline lighting handles the house, landscape lighting takes care of the yard: paths, garden beds, trees and stairs. Done well, it looks like the yard is lit and not like a row of lamps. Done badly, you get a line of glowing dots along the path and not much else. The pieces of a plan Path lighting is usually the starting point, since walking to the door in the dark is the daily problem. Uplighting on the trees

Landscape lighting is a design problem before it is a shopping problem Where roofline lighting handles the house, landscape lighting takes care of the yard: the walk, the beds, the trees, the steps. The goal is light you see the effect of, not fixtures you count. Done badly, you get a line of glowing dots along the path and not much else. What goes in a typical plan Path lighting is usually the starting point, because it is the part that does a job every night. Uplighting

Before anything goes on the house The first step is a free consultation, not a truck in the driveway. Somebody comes out and looks at the roofline, talks through what you are after, and figures out which lines are worth lighting. The consultation is free and it does not commit you to anything. Why the design comes first Your house is not the same shape as the one down the street, so the plan gets drawn around it. A good design traces the lines the building already has: the

Where homeowners go wrong Outdoor lighting gets quoted fast and understood slowly. A package price and a custom design can land within a few hundred dollars of each other, and look nothing alike once installed. Is there a real design? Ask to see the design before you talk price. If somebody can point at the gables and tell you why, you are talking to the right people. A company that will not is selling you a package. Ask what happens after the install Lighting sits out in

The oversight The front of a home absorbs a lot of budget. Every bit of it only exists while it is light out. After dark the house is a dark shape with a porch light on it. For a solid stretch of the year, the evening view is the one most people get.Put together, these are not expensive changes. What it requires is treating the evening view as something worth planning, which almost nobody does. The houses that look good at night got that way on purpose. What actually chang

The back of the house is not curb appeal The front of a property gets judged from the street. The patio is for people sitting in it. That flips the priorities. Nobody is grading the back yard from the street. The only test is whether the space gets used.All of which adds up to one point. A roofline system handles the street view and very little for the space behind it. Two spaces, two separate sets of requirements to satisfy. Glare ruins more patios than darkness does A si

Curb appeal gets planned entirely for daylight People spend real money on the front of a house: landscaping, paint, hardware, plantings. Every bit of it only exists while it is light out. Then the sun goes down and none of it is visible. For a solid stretch of the year, the evening view is the one most people get.None of that requires much: an outline, a focal point, and matched color. The uncommon part is planning for it at all, rather than the cost. The houses that look g

The case for not doing it yourself The job seems small in the driveway, then it eats a whole weekend. Add the second story, a roof with a real pitch to it, and the fact that December in the Upstate can be wet, and the math changes. What a real installation service includes The job has four parts, and the last two are the ones people forget to ask about. First a design, based on your roofline and your yard. Then installation, which is the part you are really paying to skip.