Exterior Recessed Lighting: Pros and Cons of Exterior Recessed Lights

If you want to create a subtle, beautiful accent to any area around your home, look no further than installing exterior recessed lighting. This type of lighting is a great, eco-friendly way to set a mood that simply cannot be matched by using normal halogen outdoor flood lights or other light fixtures. There are several disadvantages to using recessed lighting fixtures as well, but they are easily outgunned by the advantages.

Advantages of Outdoor Recessed Lighting

There are several different advantages to incorporating exterior recessed lighting into your garden lighting plan. First, recessed lights are more eco-friendly than other more traditional flood lights. They cause much less light pollution around your neighborhood and don’t as readily disrupt the life cycles of birds, bugs, and other animals. They are also clean and unobtrusive, and don’t draw too much attention to themselves. This allows you to set a nice mood with ambient light while still enjoying the best aspects of the night.

By removing the actual light fixtures itself using recessed lighting eliminates a trip hazard for yourself and your family. It also can make mowing and upkeep of your garden and lawn easier by removing a light fixture that you have to mow around with more traditional lighting methods. Finally, recessed lighting fixtures can be used in huge amount of different settings and will work great.
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Landscaping Ideas for Front Yard and Driveways

Because they are the first thing that most people will see when they come to your property, having great landscaping ideas for front yard is very important. Whether you’re just giving your front yard a little facelift or you’re planning a major overhaul, here are five simple landscaping ideas for front of house that you can use to make sure that your yard looks the best it possibly can.

Use Borders for a Finished Look

Whether you have flowerbeds in the front of your house, borders around trees, or just a driveway or pathway leading up to your front door, your front yard will have a much more polished look if you add borders to the edges of it. Brick borders work wonders around flowerbeds, while flowerbeds themselves can add a nice border between a driveway and the rest of your property.

Soften the Edges of Your Home with Brushes and Hedges

Another great way that you can improve your front yard landscaping is by softening up the harsh edges of your home. The easiest way to do this is by adding some bushy or flowery bushes and hedges along the length of your home, but especially at the corners. Not only will your house look better from the outside, but adding these will give you a little bit more privacy inside your home as well.

Add in Outdoor Lighting to Accent Your Home

When you’re thinking about front yard landscape ideas, don’t forget to make adding outdoor lighting a part of the plan as well! Lighting in your front yard should be of two different types, path lighting and accent lighting. Use path lighting along paths, steps, and the driveway leading up to your house to keep it safer and more well lit, while also creating a strong sight line that makes your front door the focal point. There are many driveway lighting ideas that you can use, but they will differ depending on the length and shape of your driveway.

Accent lighting also works great in your front yard. Accent lighting makes your home look professionally designed, but it doesn’t have to be done by a professional! Simply take a pick a few aspects of your front yard that you would like to focus on at night, whether they be a trees, shrub, flowers, or the front of your house. Stick some solar spotlights around it – using them for up lighting is the best – and you have a lighting plan that would make any landscape designer proud. If you need help choosing lights, we recommend Malibu Garden Lights. The sheer amount of different things you can do with outdoor lighting makes it one of the most powerful landscaping ideas for front yard that you can implement on your own.
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