3 Ways to Brighten Up a Dark Room

There aren't many things more depressing than a room that is always dark and drab. The good news is – it doesn’t need to stay that way! With a few strategic changes you can take your gloomy room and make it into a bright and cheerful space you’ll love to spend time in.

• Swap in Some new Shades - Many of us struggle with the blinds and shades in our homes. If we have them open, anyone can see in. Also, open shades or blinds can leave the room too bright, or too hot making it impossible to sit and watch TV or talk to someone comfortably. That problem is easily solved by solar roller shades new jersey. They let you leave the shade down all the time. The sun can come in to a degree, but it doesn’t get hot or cause horrible reflections on your TV. People can’t see in from the outside either. So, you get a bright room without all the drawbacks of blinds or traditional shades.
    
• Add Some Large Mirrors - Mirrors do an excellent job of reflecting more than just your appearance. They can reflect light back into the room as well. There’s a scene from a movie about the life of Thomas Edison. As a child, he runs around his neighborhood getting mirrors from all to get enough light for a surgeon to operate on this mother with just a few candles. It’s an unfounded story, but a good illustration of what the effect is overall. You can decorate with some pretty mirrors and brighten your room at the same time.
    
• Paint With Light Colors - Paint your room a white or light color. The lighter color will make the room seem immediately brighter. You can easily bring color into the room with accents. Plants and cut flowers will bring in color and have the bonus of brightening up the room as well. Make sure to use an eggshell, satin, or semi-gloss finish for easier cleaning.

It’s not very enjoyable to spend time in a room that is dark and dreary. With just a few changes, you can transform a dull room into a brighter, airier space for you to enjoy.

The Before and the After

I am horrible at remembering to take Before and After pictures.  The house was fine when we moved in - of course, not exactly what we might have chosen if we'd been the ones to choose the paint, light fixtures, etc. ourselves, but definitely liveable until we could change things.  After seeing some of the houses on the market with the gaudy wallpaper and/or different bright and obnoxious paint colors in every room, that was a real plus!

Since we've moved in, we've taken the stair rail out, so we could get my new dresser upstairs. I didn't even think of taking pictures of the old stair rail until it was already gone.  The new one isn't up yet, so I'll have to wait on the after pictures.  

We've changed the ceiling fan in our bedroom -

The new one looks really good with our new bedroom furniture, and it's quiet.  The old one was a bit noisy for sleeping, and it looked like - Well, I forgot to take a before picture.

We changed the light fixture in the dining room, too -

It's much nicer than the old one, though you'll have to take my word for it, because I didn't take a before picture of that one either.  However, this could kind of be a before picture for this week's project.  See that wallpaper on the dining room wall?  We pulled it all down this week.  And, again, I didn't think about taking any before pictures, not until we were almost finished and there was just one area of wallpaper left beside and behind the china cabinet -

The wallpaper wasn't horrible. I mean, I didn't hate it, but it wasn't something we would have chosen, either.  Thankfully it came off the walls fairly easily, and the more stubborn spots scraped right off with a little warm water from a sponge.  Now we just have to get the paint.  But, for now, no more wallpaper!

This last picture should qualify as both an after pic and a before pic then - after the wallpaper and before the paint.  Right?

I'll try to do better from now on.  It is kind of fun to see the changes. 

Is It Dark in Here?

I like a lot of light in my house - especially in the kitchen.  It's really hard to work when I feel like I'm casting a shadow over whatever it is that I'm working on.  Unfortunately it's been feeling a bit dark in my kitchen recently.  The lights over the stove are part of the microwave we installed when we first built and moved into the house - and that's been almost 14 years.  That microwave has been having some issues, one of those being that the light will randomly go off when I close the door.  So I'm always having to turn the light back on so I can see what I'm doing, and the bulbs seem to burn out faster, really leaving me in the dark until I can get my husband to replace them.  (The microwave is probably going to need replaced soon, too - or we'll need a range-hood of some kind to replace it)

And the fluorescent light on the ceiling doesn't seem as bright as it used to be...  Thankfully I can still get some decent light from the pendant light fixtures over the sink and in the dining room.  I cannot imagine being able to work without the light over my sink!  I don't necessarily have to use it when I've got sunshine pouring into the window, but the rest of the time it's on.  It looks pretty, too - and matches the one in the dining room.

Even after all these years, I still like them.  Choosing was hard, but I think we did a good job!  There are so many different styles of lighting fixtures that we could have chosen just about anything, which is why it was so hard.  That, and the knowledge we would be living with the fixtures we chose for a long time!  I think the key is to look at a lot of them and pay attention to the ones you are drawn to over and over again.  Narrow it down to the top three (or four) and then choose from those.  Most of all - do not forget to check to see how much light they put out, because no matter how great they look, if it's still dark in your house, you need some new lighting fixtures!

More Options, Harder Decisions

I was just thinking the other day that it's been more than a year since we had everything on our house re-done.  Time sure flies!  And I am still really liking the green siding, which is really good since we're 'stuck' with it for a good long time now, huh?  We're still appreciating how nice everything turned out, maybe not every time we pull into the driveway, but often enough.  I guess it was worth all the decisions we had to make in choosing everything!

I was talking to someone not too long ago about building a house and all the choices that have to be made - from siding, shutters, and shingles to carpeting, paint, and pendant lighting - so many decisions!  I said I thought it was easier when we first built the house because there were limited options to choose from.  I don't think we had more than 10 choices for siding colors and shingles, if that many.  And we couldn't choose the same ones that our immediate neighbors had already picked - which is good so you don't have identical houses sitting side by side, but that limited the options even more.  There were a few options for carpet colors and vinyl flooring patterns, and maybe 2 or 3 cabinet wood colors and styles.

We did have a few more choices when it came to picking out the lights in the house.  They gave us a total budget and sent us to a lighting store to pick out the lights for the whole house.  An entire store full of lights of all types - ceiling fan lights, fluorescent lights for the kitchen, the pendant lighting for over the bar and the dining room table, the lights to go over the mirrors in the bathrooms.  It took a while, but we picked out our lights, and I'm still happy with them, so I guess we did OK.  Imagine if we'd had a website like LampClick to choose from.  It would have taken weeks, instead of one long afternoon in the store.  I don't even need any new lighting right now, and I'm still browsing through the site picking out things I like.  There are so many options!  You can browse by style, finish, price, and even height and width.  You can even shop by room!  With all the tools for narrowing down the options, it might be a lot easier to find just the right lighting than I originally thought - given all the options.

When we were picking new siding, new shingles, and all the other details when we had to get them redone last year after the tornado, the decisions were so much harder than when we first built the house - because there were so many more things to choose from.  The new contractor gave us many more options to choose from than our original contractor.  I don't know if it's because there are more options out there now, or if the builder got especially good deals on certain things so that's all they made available for us to choose from, which probably helped to keep the cost of building the house down.  While it was easier to make choices when there were limited options to choose from, in the end I'd rather have more options.  It may make the choosing harder, but the end result is more likely to be something we're going to like for a long time.

What Part of turn light on if you want to participate Do You Not Understand?

Image via WikipediaFor reasons I do not understand, there are two separate times for kids in our village to go Trick or Treating - once on Sunday from 4-6 for the whole village, and again tonight from 6-8 for our subdivision. Why one is not enough is beyond me, and why don't they actually do it on Halloween?

As always, the announcements say to turn your outside light on if you want to participate. We don't do Halloween. We don't participate. We don't turn the outside light on. That doesn't stop the little trick or treaters from ringing our doorbell, repeatedly. I'm pretty sure the parents of most of these kids are right there with them. They should be able to tell the difference between a light that is on and a light that isn't, even if the kids can't.

Decorative LED Lights

Every year around Christmas time I wonder about the sky high electric bills that people must have with all those lights they use for decoration. We don't decorate, but I still like the lights, so we have several sets we bought on clearance. We've used them for things like decorating for a dance, hanging behind the bar downstairs, and we have some red, white and blue rope lights that we have outside on the column by our front door. We like to turn those on around holidays like Memorial Day, Independence Day, and Veterans Day.

If we had some of these LED Christmas lights instead of the regular old lights, we could use them even more. These new lights are more energy efficient, using only 90% of the energy required by the old kind of lights. They're also safer, virtually indestructible, and last more than 50,000 hours. I'm already picturing them out on our new patio and pergola, whenever we get that finished.

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