Brighten up your bedroom before summer with these light loving tips

Posted on Wednesday, February 13th, 2019

Summer is on the way, so a refreshing abundance of natural light will be arriving with it. However, if your bedroom often looks disappointingly dark, the summer sunshine might not, in itself, be enough to rectify that. You can therefore make its job easier by making your bedroom more summer-ready yourself.

In this article, we are going to list a few clever ways in which you can get the seasonal sunlight bouncing around the room to delightfully illuminating effect.

Make your walls right – paint them white

When painted on walls, white not only reflects light, but also makes the given room feel bigger, says The Cheat Sheet. The room’s design might even let you get away with painting just one accent wall. Painting a wall facing a window could suffice for reflecting the light most effectively.

Still, if you would prefer to extend the white treatment to the whole room, you could benefit from hiring a painter to do so on your behalf. Otherwise, the paint could accidentally end up on furniture.

Lighten your window treatments

What do you currently have draped over or on either side of your windows? If those treatments are heavy drapes or shades, they could be blocking an unwelcomingly high amount of sunlight. For this reason, swapping them for blinds and Roman shades could be shrewd.

Window treatments in such light colours as creams and light brown can work well. If you are eager for blinds, choose cloth blinds of light fabric rather than sunlight-blocking wood or plastic.

Use electric lighting – of the cost-effective kind

One of the benefits of utilising natural light is that it does not bring any financial charge. However, you could still opt to draw upon electric lighting; after all, the cost of doing so can depend on the exact type of electric lighting you choose.

Whereas installing fluorescent or incandescent bulbs would add unhelpfully to your energy bill, LED or CFD lighting can be financially appealing to install in dark rooms.

Reflect the light with strategically-placed mirrors

Once your room has enough light, either natural or artificial, you could consider attaching mirrors to the walls. See where light is going from an electrical lighting fixture or through a window, and then place mirrors in ways that allow this light to effectively reflect.  

You can double a room’s amount of sunlight by letting it bounce off reflective surfaces, says ELLE Decor. Is there a particularly big window directly across from which you can hang a large mirror?

Trim trees overlooking your windows

If your garden has any bushes or trees that are especially close to the windows, much sunlight could be prevented from reaching the glass, and therefore the inside of your bedroom.

This would make it wise for you to regularly trim such problematic foliage, while you should also resist planting trees to the south of your home. Otherwise, those trees would fail to even provide summer shade due to the height of the sun, while they could also bar solar warmth through your windows in the winter.