Interior Lighting

How to Light a Room with no Overhead Lighting

Depending on how old your brand new property is and when it was built, it is possible that it might not have any overhead lighting or ceiling lights. Although this is a rarity in modern homes, it’s surprisingly common in many older buildings.

If you are faced with this issue, you may wonder how on earth you are going to provide enough lighting for the main living areas such as your living room, dining room and bedrooms.

Obviously, you could hire an electrician or lighting specialist to solve the issue by carrying out some upgrades to the electrical wiring ion your home. However, this may not be a viable option for you financially, especially if you have a particularly tight budget.

Best Ideas For Lighting

However, rather than seeing it as a problem, you could choose to see it as a challenge. In the following post we are going to offer some effective solutions to providing alternatives to ceiling lights.

Plug-in Wall Lamps and Plug-In Sconces

One of the wondrous things you may not have realized you can invest in is wall lamps. These are a great solution to the issue of not having ceiling lights because they do not require any wiring in and they also allows you to make the use of the available space you have, while freeing up floor space.

A nice option to bring some illumination into rooms if you don’t want to rely on floor lamps and their stands getting in the way.

Plug-in wall lamps and sconces are a real lifesaver, lighting wise. Predominately, you would use them for accent lighting or task lighting, which is great in a living room because you can install them close to sofas and chairs and use them as reading lights.

Table Lamps

Table lamps are something that most people seem to have. Many even have two or three. So, it’s easy to understand why these would make for a great alternative to overhead lighting when that’s just not possible.

You don’t even need to settle for those old-fashioned table lamps with their basic lampshade and simple bulb socket all our parents seemed to have when we were younger.

There are a multitude of stylish and attractive table lamps to choose from, making it relatively easy to find the right models for your current furnishings, color scheme and décor.

Swag Pendant Lights

Swag pendant lights, or to give them their more accurate title of chandeliers you can plug in anywhere, are a great way to add an extra bit of sophistication and classic style to your home.

These don’t require any wiring and can provide a healthy dose of overhead lighting that will help illuminate even the darkest spots in your home.

How do they work? You simply setup a hook on the ceiling, plug the lamp into the wall and then attach the pendant’s chain to the hook and hey presto, you have light.

What’s great about these kind of pendant lights is because they have increased in popularity over the last decade or so, there are now a greater number of different styles that you could easily use them in just about every room in your property, without them becoming too samey-looking.

Floor Lamps

Ah, the classic alternative to ceiling lights. Floor lamps are something most people are familiar with. However, they are generally used as mood lighting or softer lighting so you can turn off the main ceiling lights at the tail end of the day to conserve power and give your home that evening dark and cozy look and feel.

When you don’t have ceiling lights, though, these are a great alternative.

String Lights

Although they may not seem like something you would find at the Ritz or the Hilton, if you are stuck for a solution to not enough lighting from above and are on a tight budget, these little beauties might just do the trick. They are fun and easy to setup and can be arranged into virtually any pattern.

As they are lightweight and compact, they also only need something simple like hooks or even nails to hang them from and you could even just hang them from pieces of (non-fabric) furniture.

LED Strip Lights

LED Strip Lights are another option like string lights that may not be the most glamorous of solutions, but with a little ingenuity and creativity with where you place them, they can really add atmosphere to a room.

Additional Tips

Additional Hot Tip No.1 – Using Mirrors

If you use a tall floor lamp, as noted further up the page, and stand it in front of a mirror, the mirror could be a lean-to version sitting on the floor against the wall or hanging behind the lighting.

This helps with the problem of having no ceiling lights by reflecting the light generated from the lamp to other parts of the room.

As well as helping to improve the lighting in rooms without overhead fixtures, this also helps you get more bang for your buck.

Additional Hot Tip No. 2 – Use More Powerful Bulbs

Even if you are currently using some of the options we’ve outlined above, what can you do if you still feel the lighting is a little lackluster? Well, rather than investing in more floor lamps, pendants and table lamps, you could improve the actual bulbs.

By choosing brighter bulbs, especially in the lights providing more of the fill lighting for the room, you could increase the amount of light overall, without using up more of your precious floor or wall space.

Remember though, the more powerful the bulb, the more electricity it will use. So, it’s best to look for energy-efficient options like LED bulbs.

So, as you can see, rather than panicking when you realize you don’t have ceiling lights in your brand-new property and looking in the classifieds for the cheapest electrician, you could just use one or more of the suggestions above and illuminate your home effectively.

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