Some setups are absolutely extraordinary and breath-taking. Don’t believe me? See for yourself.
Depending on how you set them up, LED light strips can make your home look more elegant. Beautiful. Professional. Chic. Akin to PC enthusiasts who deck their rig out with LED lights, suiting up several areas of your home can really make you admire yourself.
With that said, here are ideas you can kick around and use inspiration for your own home.
1. How To Drop Your Guests’ Jaws
Countless studies have shown that the bright blue light of screens keeps you awake at night. That’s why so many people advise you to shut off any and all screens an hour before you hit the hay.
In fact, Flux is a cool program that gradually dims your screen (by using your device’s clock) according to the sunlight. The more the moon shines, the less your screen does. It’s pretty cool.
However, a deeper reason to understand color theory is psychological. Generally, red represents passion, anger, and energy. Yellow typically represents happiness, and brightness. Purple colors usually reflect royalty or spiritual enlightenment. Various shades of green tend to represent nature, growth, Earth, and stability.
For more in-depth information that could be articles themselves, you’ll want to beef yourself up on color relationships and harmonies.
Luckily, experimenting with LED lighting isn’t initially expensive. Grab a single RGB bulb and use it as a nightlight in your room – use a dimmer, or a multi-color bulb (several), and use yourself as a guinea pig. It’s smart to take note of what emotions each color emits from you.
Whew! What a foundation. Remember: a house without a foundation will eventually collapse.
With that said, on to the list!
2. Digger Under Those Cabinets
Do you have a kitchen? Of course, you do! How much time do you spend in the kitchen? Think about it: second to the living room and bedroom, it’s probably the most heavily visited room in your home.
And just look at the beauty! You can line LED strips underneath your cabinets, or table/island counter.
Something really cool comes from a few innovators who rigged up their fridges with strips. This is a little too advanced for me, but the results are awesome!
3. Get The Right Hook Up
No matter what lighting you choose, there’s going to be wires involved. There’s no getting around that. Fortunately, some companies came out with easy-to-use light installation connectors. These let you use a number of lights in one device!
Which is really handy for people who aren’t so savvy with wires and lack technician-like skills. (Seriously, hooking up LED strip lights is easy only if you know what you’re doing.)
4. Cove Lighting
These are great for highlighting decorative ceilings. Think about installing flexible strips in your cove. Just go to town and accentuate your ceilings’ valences. RGB cove lighting is seriously jaw-dropping and isn’t too hard to do once you figure out the basics of lining and setting.
5. TV
How much time do you spend in front of the TV? Whether it’s in your bedroom, man cave, woman’s palace, or living room… Almost everyone who’s anyone has a TV screen.
Here’s one caveat: watching TV in the dark hurts your eyes. Eventually, over the course of a few episodes, the TV “fades” into the wall and your eyes can no longer distinguish the “boob tube” or “idiot box” from the wall.
Installing a gorgeous set of LED light strips solves this problem – since it’s a border around the shape of your TV. Plus it adds a serious cool factor to your room, making it look extravagant. How’s that for killing 2 birds with one stone?
(In fact, setting up your TV with back-lighting has scientific benefits. You know how your eyes hurt when you suddenly shift from darkness to brightness… say, after popping on the lights after 2 & ½ hours of darkness? Keeping a constant back-light glow around your TV prevents this eye strain.)
6. Wall Silhouettes
If you don’t want to cover an entire wall, ceiling, or floor with a bright LED… consider silhouetting the light! All you have to do is cut out some cardboard (or whatever is easiest for you to cut and still remain sturdy enough to stand on its own)… place it against a wall, and lay down your favorite strip behind it. Easy as 123!
The results are absolutely and without a doubt stunning. The best part is you can cut out any shape or design your heart desires.
7. Wow Your Family With Bottle Lights
This idea is seriously cool. It takes some elbow grease and glass-cutting know how, but isn’t the end result worth it?
Start by cutting the bottom of a few wine bottles (with a specific glass-cutting bit) out, and then wire short web-connected RGB LED light strips through them. Next, spray the bottles with some glass-frosting spray to act as a diffuser.
(A diffuser, if you don’t know, is an industry term for “reducing light intensity.” A lot of film lighting technicians use diffusers (like white boards or bed sheets) to soften the light on actors. This is particularly helpful during daytime. Just a cool industry-insider trick I picked up working as a lighting intern on a few student films.)
Now simply run some hanging wire through the bottles… and hang them from your ceiling! I showed my girlfriend this idea and she freaked. She wanted us to run out and buy a dozen bottles of wine! (Luckily, we already have a few empty bottles saved up over the months. Hurray to no hangovers!)
Conclusion
Now that you’ve hopefully been struck by “the bug” and taken some serious notes – you can start brainstorming on your own cool LED strip light designs. Or simply use one of these seriously-beautiful choices in your own home. No matter what you decide to do… in the end… there’s no denying your guests and family and friends will be simply amazed at what you’ve done.
Plus, you may just fall even more in love with your home! Who doesn’t want that? Our homes are our sanctuaries, after all. :- )
Featured photo credit: via pixabay.com via pixabay.com
