Outdoor lighting is one of the best home investments you can make. You get to instantly enjoy the lifestyle benefits that also significantly increase the beauty and value of your home. Additionally, there are real benefits to installing outdoor lighting now, during the autumn season.
Nighttime lighting communicates. It sends a message to community friends that you want to be visible. Once considered a luxury for upscale residential homes, outdoor lighting now brings elegance to a diverse cross-section of homes and neighborhoods.
Illuminating outdoor structures and landscape elements showcase your property, but its greatest value is often the safety, security, and peace of mind it promises.
Autumn Outdoor Lighting Upgrade Benefits
There are several benefits to upgrading your outdoor lighting at this time of the year. The most important may be your awareness of its positive and negative features. For about two months you have gained a good sense of what you like and the changes necessary to bring other areas up to your standards. Lighting will help you make that happen.
Most importantly, the autumn weather should be generally more favorable for getting the work completed. Before handling lighting upgrades, it’s best to revisit the landscape design and make modifications as necessary. This may include the removal of tired plants, adding specimen plants for focal points, or generally refreshing the palette of plants for renewed interest.
Once that foundation is accomplished, it’s time to move on to hiring professionals to install or renovate your lighting. You should prepare of list of any problem areas to troubleshoot, along with the overall look and feel that you want to achieve.
#1. Coordinate Upgrades With Landscape Renewals
It turns out that making outdoor lighting changes usually requires pulling up existing cables. It’s necessary to assess how and where new connections will be made, and the gauge of wire that ideally carries the load without much voltage drop.
You may as well make similar changes to minimize future work. This is the time expand, contract, or otherwise redesign ornamental planting beds. Of course, this work may require some reconfiguration of your automatic sprinkler system spray patterns.
In short, take full advantage of the cooler weather and workable soil to freshen the design and simplify future maintenance. Autumn is an ideal season for reestablishing turfgrass. If you get the work done before the end of October, you should have no trouble getting seed to germinate and harden off before winter.
Take advantage of this time when leaves are falling to prune trees and shrubs. A Certified Arborist can best shape your signature trees to attain their best, natural architecture. This will simplify lighting installations and minimize modifications in the nearvterm to accommodate growth.
Once the overall landscape design is refined, locating path lights for accents and safety will be simplified. If you aren’t sure about all of the lighting fixtures, encourage your lighting contractor to install underground PVC pipes in strategic areas. This is a common tactic to minimize the impact to your lawn or landscape down the road.
#2. Use The Next Holiday To Test The System
Before we discuss how your system can integrate with the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, first consider how you can use Halloween to test your system while the weather is still relatively warm.
Halloween is a time to see your outdoor spaces as you tend to use them for holidays. Some families use the front walkway and entrance for all kinds of functions and displays. This may include jack-o-lanterns or benches for Christmas Santas and gifts.
Ask yourself how you would like them better lighted and incorporate that into your outdoor lighting system. Have you needed extra power for supplemental Christmas lights that your current house system cannot handle? This may justify the cost of installing a sub-panel to your home’s electrical supply to be sure your Christmas, Thanksgiving, or Halloween displays are sufficiently lighted.
If you plan for all of your outdoor lighting related events, you will economize on set-up time and have the peace of mind that everything will work as expected, no matter the potential snowy or rainy weather conditions.
#3. Integrate Christmas Lights With Outdoor Lighting
Many homes have pathway or accent lights already in place for landscape lighting. These can be integrated into the Christmas light installation by changing the bulbs to festive colors or using them to highlight holiday decorations. For example, pathway lights can lead to a Christmas wreath or nativity scene, while accent lights can illuminate holiday greenery or inflatables.
Some outdoor lighting fixtures, such as uplights or downlights used for landscaping, can double as mounts or support structures for Christmas decorations. For instance, you can attach string lights or garlands to uplighting posts or wrap lights around trees already illuminated by your system. This maximizes the visual impact of both the outdoor lighting and holiday decorations.
If your outdoor lighting system is equipped with color-changing capabilities (via RGB lights), you can sync the colors of your landscape lighting to complement your Christmas lights. For instance, warm whites can match the glow of your Christmas decorations, or the system can transition to festive greens and reds to enhance the holiday spirit.
Proactive Landscaping: Helping Oklahoma Homeowners Enjoy Outdoor Living
Our top priority is creating living spaces that are right for you. We pride ourselves on working with you from concept to construction to create the right landscape for your needs. Contact us today for a free consultation to explore your next landscaping project.
As the late season days get shorter, many people tend to stop using their outdoor living space during those months. However, installing new landscape lighting equipment in your backyard and outdoor rooms allows you to extend the usage of your outdoor space.
Coming home from work to a beautifully illuminated house during autumn also allows you to fully appreciate the function of landscape lighting in your outdoor living space. It makes all your hard work installing it worthwhile.
