When it comes to providing a home with everything we need to feel good living in it, we tend to think almost exclusively about furniture, decoration or the color of the rooms.
But to make an accurate planning of how our home will look, previously we must take into account an essential and basic factor: the correct lighting of the house.
Using sunlight to illuminate your house is something essential that you should not lose sight of. In fact, once you do, you will notice that your home acquires new dimensions and that corners that you did not take into account regain prominence. The economic savings in the electricity bill is also another good reason to definitely bet on optimal lighting of the home with natural light.
In addition to the decorative and economic reasons, it is also advisable to use sunlight to illuminate the rooms and main areas of the house for health reasons. Using solar lighting in your home will make you stay active and more relaxed, giving you a high level of well-being.
Next, we are going to guide you through the best tips for lighting a house with sunlight. In this way you will have it very easy to get the most out of your home by lighting it correctly.
How to gain natural light in areas with difficult lighting
If you have the opportunity to plan your house completely, you will be able to gain many integers when it comes to providing good natural lighting to areas that normally have more difficulty in obtaining good sunlight. To try to minimize the existence of areas of the house that are difficult for sunlight to reach, it is advisable to avoid dividing the home into numerous spaces.
Within the possibilities, and maintaining the functionality of the home, to guarantee an optimal distribution of the natural light that we obtain, it is advisable to maintain the maximum possible amplitude in the whole of the house.
Another tip with great results is that you try to attribute a natural light entrance to each room of the house, or at least to the main areas such as dining room, kitchen, living room and bedrooms.
For the bathroom, the corridor or secondary rooms where we do not have a main entrance of light planned, there is an interesting effective and discreet option: skylights and pavés. With them you can get a large amount of natural light to illuminate your home in an elegant and simple way.
Tricks to maximize the incidence of natural light in your home
Regardless of the amount of natural light that enters your home, there are several tricks that you can apply so that the lighting effect is maximized and the sunlight you are getting is used to the maximum.
Use stores and thin curtains to facilitate the passage of sunlight
If before we talked about the importance of windows to facilitate the entry of sunlight into the house, we must not forget the stores or curtains that accompany them. If you place thick stores, the sunlight that enters through the window will be muffled and the feeling of light will be reduced. This can be interesting if you are lucky enough to have large windows that provide good lighting, because it will help you achieve a relaxing effect through a softer light in the sunny hours.
But if, on the other hand, you need to make the most of every ray of sunlight that enters through your window, it will be advisable to install curtains or stores of a lesser thickness, which let in sunlight. In this way you will take advantage of the light to the maximum while the stores or curtains prevent you from seeing the interior of the house.
Another obstacle with which we are very familiar, but which has a direct impact on the free circulation of light inside the house, are opaque doors. If your house is very dark, consider installing doors in which glass (transparent or translucent) is the protagonist. In this way you will get a large part of the light to enter most of the different rooms of the house.
Use light colors on the walls and floors to maximize lighting
Applying light-toned colors to the walls of your house will allow the sunlight that enters your home to be used to the maximum, since it will not be absorbed by the different surfaces. This will generate a more intense light effect in the room and will give an effect of spaciousness to the rooms. The use of colors such as white, beige … both on the walls and on the floor and furniture will be your best ally to distribute the light evenly.
Strategically distribute mirrors to multiply the brightness of a room
In our search of how to light a house with natural sun light, we cannot miss the use of mirrors. Located in key points of the home will be another point in your favor when it comes to making the most of the light distribution. In almost every home there are darker areas where natural light finds it difficult to reach. These points are usually the hallway, the hall … Identify the areas of your house with more dark spots and decorate the areas near it, where there is enough light, with a mirror that goes according to the decoration of your home.
This will distribute the light and make the darkest area brighter. It is not necessary for sunlight to reflect directly on the mirror. If the place where you put the mirror has a medium light, it will be enough for it to be partially distributed over the area.
Avoid tall furniture that blocks the light and rethink that partition you doubt
Another important point in our goal of how to light a house with natural sun light are the furnitures and doors. Sometimes it may be worth doing without a decorative element to obtain or enhance another. This would be the case with tall units: although they dress the rooms a lot thanks to their remarkable dimensions, they can be counterproductive when it comes to achieving an optimal propagation of light. Therefore, it may be a good idea to have low furniture that allows the distribution of light and does not act as a screen.
Partitions are another of the great enemies of the distribution of natural light throughout the house. Although it is true that it is not always easy to make a home open-plan (an ideal situation in which the light would flow freely), we can consider doing without those walls that do not play a decisive role in the distribution of the house. Sometimes just by pulling a partition that is obstructing an important point of natural lighting we can obtain a notable increase in the level of luminosity of the home. If at some point in the home you do not want to do without a partition, but you need the light to flow, you can always establish a glass partition as an alternative to the traditional wall. In this way, apart from maintaining that feeling of a wall, all the light from the next room will penetrate into that other space.
With these simple tips, the use of natural light in your home will improve significantly.
And you, how do you take advantage of sunlight in your home? You can leave us your comment below.