One of the necessary finishing touches to any well maintained property is the use of outdoor landscape lighting fixtures. Landscape lighting increases the visual appeal of your house and the functionality of much of your land and it brings your property value along for the ride as well. Designing lights that will take both you and your neighbor’s breath away on a nightly basis is not hard. You just need the proper planning and installation to get it done right.

Decide On Your Outdoor Landscape Lighting Theme and Fixtures

When it’s viewed at night without any lights, your landscape is almost like a blank canvas that you can draw anything on. The first thing you must figure out is what type of mood you would like to set with your outdoor landscape lighting. To do this, take a walk around your property and night and try to figure out what you could be doing after dark and what you would like you and other people around to feel like while they’re doing it. Maybe you want your deck to have an island theme for when you have cookouts or maybe you want to give some of the trees a spooky, almost surreal feel with long shadows. Let your imagination run wild with the possibilities.

While you’re doing this avoid the mistake many homeowners make and try to only choose one theme to light your house in. One theme will give everything a consistent feel that can be built on, but if you try to mash together too many themes in a tiny area, you will end up with no theme at all and just a lot of tacky lights. Pick something and stay with it. If you want to go to a different style, you can always change lights out later.

After you’ve decided what general theme you want to employ, its time to decide on the different outdoor landscape lights and lighting methods you would like to employ. Start first with how you would like to light the paths on your property; these can range from driveways to actual walking paths through your garden. These are the easiest lights to decide on and so should give you a great starting point. After you’ve decided on your path lighting style, try to decide how you would like the entrances to your house lit. After the entrances, move to deciding the lighting style for the large objects in your landscape, such as large trees, shrubs, pools, and facades. Finally, figure out the accent lighting for smaller areas and objects on your property. Start with the easiest and largest things to light and work your way down.

While you are doing this, it might help to either sketch out a picture of your landscape and draw in the lights, or if you’re really talented, take a picture use a computer program such as Photoshop to do much the same thing. This will help you get a better overall picture of how your landscape will end up looking once the lights are installed.

Things to Keep In Mind While Designing the Lights

While you’re trying to sketch out the lights you would like to use on your property, try to have a specific task in for each bulb you are trying to place. Are you place lights here for security or are they just to make sure people aren’t tripping over the stairs? Different tasks will need different bulbs and different features to accomplish what you hope them to.

If you are aiming for accent lighting your garden while placing your outdoor landscape lights, try to create some dramatic touches if possible. Do this by playing with the different shadows that object throw off. Try moving lights around and placing them at different heights to give you different looks.

Finally, one other very important thing to keep in mind when planning your landscape lighting scheme is how far away your lights will ultimately be from the transformer if you are planning on using low voltage landscape lighting. You transformer will turn the normal 120 volt current electricity into 12 to 22 volt power that will not shock people out in your lawn. However, the downside to this that the further away from the transformer you run power cords, the dimmer your lights will be. This needs to be taken into consideration as well.

By using these design tips and other creative landscape lighting ideas, you will be well on your way to creating the outdoor landscape lighting that will be the envy of the entire neighborhood. Just make sure to do your research and start planning today!

Designing the exterior garden lighting style that you want in your yard can be incredibly exciting.  Your garden essentially becomes a blank canvas that you can put any and all of your ideas on and unleash all of your inner creativity to create any number of effects and moods.  However, despite being well-intentioned many people make some very common mistakes when trying to design the lights in the garden.  But with the right research and time spent designing your lighting scheme you can avoid being subject to this shame.  These are but a few of the all-too-common mistakes people make when designing their low voltage garden lighting and how to avoid them.

Design Mistake #1 – Using Too Much Light

Sadly, the most common mistake most people make when lighting their gardens is using too much light.  Gardeners will use very high wattage bulbs in many of their light fixtures, washing out the entire area in light.  You should not be lighting up your garden in the same way that you would light up your yard to play a game of catch at night.  Instead of turning night into day, use the night to create dramatic effects and shadows with your plants.

Avoiding this mistake is easy – just use fewer, lower wattage bulbs.  Subtle light is the key.  Enjoy the night and the different sides of your garden that it can bring out, don’t try to wash it away with a gigantic light that could double as a spotlight for the local car dealership.

Design Mistake #2 – Using More Than One Type of Material

With so many different outdoor garden lighting fixtures out on the market today, it can be tempting to want to use all of them in your garden – don’t.  All of the light fixtures in your garden should have the same general look and theme to create a sense of continuity.  All of your lights do not have to be in the exact same style, but the changes in them should not be too dramatic.  Don’t try to do too much at once.  Pick a style that you like and stick with it.  You can always change fixtures to something else later.

Mistake #3 – Trying to Create More Than One Theme or Mood

Along the same lines as the previous mistake, don’t try to create too many moods in your garden.  If you have a huge estate with large botanical gardens that would make Louis XVI of France jealous, then by all means feel free to create different sections of your garden with different moods.  However, most of us will be tightly constrained by the property area that we have available.  For this reason, creating more than one mood will cause your garden to lack continuity and instead of feeling the emotions that you’re trying to elicit from them, most visitors to your garden will just leave confused to as why you put island-inspired lights right next to an area lit like a Japanese rock garden.

Avoiding this mistake is simple as well.  Just pick one general theme and mood that you would like anyone visiting your garden to experience and draw all your lighting around trying to recreate this feeling.  If you go this route nine times out of ten you will succeed in setting up the type of mood you would like to establish.

Mistake #4 – Using Low Quality Materials and Construction Methods

Installing garden lights, especially if you’re planning on having an extensive low voltage system, can be expensive and time consuming.  The temptation may be to use lower quality materials to save some money so you can light more of your property at once or fudge a little bit in installing the lights by doing things like not burying wires when you should.  However this is one of the biggest mistakes that you can make.  The garden lighting system that you are installing will hopefully last for years without any major maintenance costs other than replacing light bulbs.  By using lower quality materials and construction methods you are setting yourself up for a lot more headaches down the road.

Make sure that you know exactly how much time and money you are willing to put into installing your garden lighting.  If you don’t have all the money necessary to install the quality lights you want, either save up until you do or just install some of the lights.  You can always come back later and add more.  Also make sure that you have enough time to properly install the lights once you buy them so that you don’t end up with a rushed job.  Remember, measure twice cut once.

Garden Lighting Mistake #5 – Using a High Maintenance System

Whatever system you install for your garden lights should be as low maintenance as you can possibly make it up front.  Make sure that light bulbs or lighting fixtures aren’t going to be an incredible pain to change.  Consider make the entire system work on a remote control, an easily accessible switch, or even a timer.  After your lights are installed, you should be spending your time enjoying them, not trying to keep them in proper working order.

If you avoid these five common garden lighting mistakes, you should be well on your way to having the perfect plan for lighting your garden in no time.  Just make sure to do your research, comparison shop, and spend enough time planning out where you want the lights to go and soon you will have a system that is the envy of the neighborhood, increases your property value, and allows you and your friends to enjoy your garden in literally a whole new light.