Saturday, 7 March 2009

Invite Your Guests In With Stylish Outdoor Lighting!

By Ned Dagostino

Friendly visits are usually made in the evenings. The visits made through formal invitations are important no doubt, but the impromptu ones are better indicators of your status and reputation in your social circle. If you find the invited visitors far outnumbering the impromptu ones then you need to do something to restore the balance. One way is to light up your house and make it more attractive to your friends and neighbors.

There is a wide variety of lighting fixtures suitable for outdoor use. This guarantees that you will surely find the fixtures that you want for your house. On the hand, this very profusion of styles can get a little confusing. Which one? A ranch-lamp style fixture or that streetlamp fixture that lit up the streets in the early 1900s? Let's go through this handful of simple guidelines to help you make a wise choice.

The lamp used for outdoor lighting has to be protected from the elements. If the lamp is to be used in a sheltered location, then you can use almost any shade or fixture to hold it. However if it is located right out in the open, then you'll need specifically designed weather-proof fixtures.

Functionality apart, you can use the outdoor lighting fixtures to enhance the aesthetic appeal of your house. After all, the whole point of this exercise is to make your house look inviting, right? So match the style of the fixtures with the general architectural style of the house.

Make sure you go for high quality fixtures. Don't skimp on paying a little extra, knowing that the cost of replacement will effectively double the initial cost of the fixture.

If you don't have much experience in buying outdoor lighting fixtures you could study user's feedback and expert reviews of the items of interest. You'll find these in hardware- and lighting-specific trade magazines. Online bulletin boards and user groups are a good source of valuable information. Learn to filter out the one-off experiences, go with the general trend, positive or negative.

Make sure you get firsthand experiences from friends and family who have put up lighting fixtures similar to the one you are interested in.

Make sure you estimate the lighting requirement accurately. Ordering six fixtures from an online store, only to find that they are inadequate is going to up the bill unnecessarily, besides delaying the project.

As you can see there are no complicated issues when you're choosing fixtures for your outdoor lighting. Just follow these simple, commonsense guidelines and watch your house come alive at night!

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