Hi all, I delayed doing landscape lighting when we built our house, but have since been wanting to go after the project. With all this time socially distancing, I thought this might be a good time to make the splurge and get the project done. I was initially looking at the pre-packaged kits on the site, but started to worry that it would limit my ability to expand or do extra things due to transformer size, etc. Would love some ideas from the group, have seen some great projects on the website/forums. We have a great brick/stucco chimney feature on front of house that I would love to uplight or accent somehow. Also thought it might be good to light the small redbud trees in the landscaping and perhaps provide some lights on house or landscape on walkway up to front door. We have a post light and two porch lights that provide some light, but I really want to do more. Would love any input on ideas for lighting as well as what type/size of fixtures to use. Here's some pictures of the house/yard area. John
Beautiful house! Kits can always be a great starting point and are extremely popular amongst homeowners for simple DIY projects. But, I'd be happy to make some general recommendations on how you could customize a system of your own as well - I attached some photos to help illustrate. Overall, a combination of path lights, spotlights, and potentially a few floodlights would do well to beautifully illuminate the front of your house. For uplighting the smaller trees and tighter spaces on the home exterior between/around windows, you'll want to stick with narrower beam spreads (15-38 degrees) - the more narrow the target, the narrower you should choose. A popular fixture for this is the Fat Boy Spotlight or the Top Dog Spotlight Path lights along the house-side of the walkway would do well to provide illumination for walking as well as accenting the garden beds with subtle light. A smaller floodlight in the garden bed on the inside corner of the garage could do well to highlight that small tree on the corner while providing a nice shadowing effect from it and the plants on the home. Our most popular path light is the Max Spread Path and Area Light For the (2) larger trees out front, any uplighting spotlight or floodlight could essentially work but, I may recommend an in-ground well light to keep the light sources hidden out in the yard and also minimize any issues with yardwork/landscaping around the trees in the future. An ideal choice for this would be the Salty Dog MR16 Well Light
Those are wonderful suggestions. Thank you. It would seem from my reading online that a popular wattage for the spots is 5w, is that probably a good bet for the spots on smaller trees and house accents? For the chimney area I want to highlight, would you have a recommendation on lamp wattage given the larger height? Should I be bumping that up to something like a 7w bulb? Or would that be overkill? For the well lights for the larger trees in front, is there a recommendation on wattage for those (5 versus 7w)? Thanks again for your ideas. Looking forward to pulling this together. John
It is really a matter of preference on the level of brightness you're looking for - a common theme is to avoid the "runway" look in regards to too intense of illumination. Personally, I would recommend 3W for most areas on the home other than the chimney - perhaps a 5W for that to help it stand out a bit more as you want. For the trees up front, 5W would be a good starting point and if the canopies become robust and the tree grows taller over the years you could always consider upgrading to a 7W down the road.
