Ever stood in the light bulb aisle staring at Kelvins, lumens, and watts like they're a foreign language? Same. And if a room in your house feels a little "off," there's a good chance it isn't your paint color. It's your lighting.
In this episode of the How to Handyma'am podcast, Arly broke down the three words on every bulb box, the three layers of light every room needs, and where your lights should actually go in your kitchen, living room, bedroom, and bathroom. Here's the written version.
This episode is dedicated to Arly's cousin Heather, a smart, curious STEM robotics mom who's both family and a friend. Everybody needs a few more Heathers!
Handy Vocab: Words You'll See in This Post
No prerequisite knowledge required. Here are the terms we use below.
Kelvins (K): The color temperature of your light, meaning how warm or cool it looks. It has nothing to do with heat.
Lumens: The amount of visible light, or how bright a bulb is.
Watts: How much energy a bulb uses.
Pendant: A light fixture that hangs from the ceiling on a cord or chain. Basically, a light bulb on a necklace.
Recessed light: A "can" light that sits flush with your ceiling, like a pancake.
Sconce: A light mounted on the wall. Think of the torches on the cave walls in Indiana Jones.
The 3 Layers of Light
A room that feels right usually has all three of these. Most rooms are missing at least one.
Ambient lighting: The general light that lets you function in a room and see where your feet are. Yes, the big light.
Task lighting: Light for a specific job, like a desk lamp that keeps your own shadow off your notebook, or a lamp by the chair where you sew or crochet.
Accent lighting: Decorative light. Either the fixture itself is pretty, or it shines on something you want to show off, like art or an architectural detail.
Arly realized her own living room had ambient and accent light, but no task light right where she sits to sew and write. If a spot in your house feels hard to work in, a missing layer is often why.
Reading the Bulb Box: Kelvins, Lumens, and Watts
Kelvins = Color
Think candlelight vs. daylight. Lower numbers (around 2500K to 3000K) give you warm, soft, yellowish light, like a cozy coffee shop. Higher numbers (3500K to 5000K and up) give you cool, bright, bluish light, like daylight or a hospital.
"Warm" and "cool" are about color, not heat. Red, orange, and yellow are warm colors, and blue, green, and purple are cool colors.
Color temperature also affects your mood. Your brain reads bright, cool light as daytime and "time to be awake," while warm light feels like sunrise and sunset, when your body starts to wind down. So match the light to the job: cooler for working, warmer for relaxing.
Lumens = Brightness
Lumens tell you how bright a bulb is, separate from its color. Think of a dimmer: same color of light, just brighter or dimmer. That means you can have warm light that's still bright. Cozy and functional!
Watts = Energy
Back in the day, you picked a bulb by its watts (40, 60, 75, or 100) because that was basically your only choice. Now LEDs use so little energy that an LED can give you the light of an old 60-watt bulb on about 8 watts. So watts matter a lot less than they used to.
One rule still matters: never put a bulb with higher wattage than your fixture is rated for. Lower is fine.
Our Shortcut: The Color-Switch Bulb
Can't decide? Get LED bulbs with a little switch on the side that changes the color from warm to cool. They cost a little more, but you can buy one kind of bulb for your whole house and set it cooler in the kitchen and warmer by your bed. Some lamps even come with a remote to change the color and brightness.
Where to Put Your Lights, Room by Room
Kitchen
Go bright. Kitchen lights are working lights, so pick bulbs with high lumens. You're chopping things up in there!
Line up your can lights with the counter. Recessed lights should run along the ceiling in line with the edge of your counter, so the light is between you and your work. If it's behind you, you'll shadow over your own cutting board.
Pendants over the island are optional. They're popular, but if your can lights are bright LEDs, you may not need them.
Put under-cabinet lights at the front. Most people mount them at the back of the cabinet, but they're more useful at the front, where they light your counter instead of your backsplash.
Living Room
Try perimeter washing. This means placing recessed lights toward the edges of the room so they shine on the walls. It draws your eye outward and makes the room feel bigger.
Find the dark spots. Look for the dim corners and put a lamp there. A floor lamp in a dark corner makes a room feel cozy at night.
Get the lamp height right. The bottom of the lamp shade should sit just below eye level when you're sitting down, so you're never staring into the bulb.
Don't put lights in front of your TV. If you want a fun flourish, add an LED strip behind it instead.
Bedroom
Light your paths. Ambient light should follow the paths you walk, like from your side of the bed to the door.
Add a lamp or sconce by the bed (or a switch you can reach from bed). Overhead light shines right in your eyes when you're reading in bed.
Light your closet from the front. Place closet lights about 2 to 3 feet out from the wall, pointed at your clothes, with a slightly cooler, more daylight bulb. It shows true colors, so you can tell black from navy.
Bathroom
The one vanity rule: don't rely on a light directly overhead. It casts ghoulish shadows on your face (great for Halloween, not for doing your makeup).
Use a sconce on each side of the mirror, just above head height, so the light hits your face evenly, the way sunlight would.
Pick a slightly cooler bulb, around 3000K to 3500K. It's still on the warm side, but closer to daylight. Skip the very blue bulbs, unless you want to see every vein in your face.
A Few More Bulb Tips
Outdoor bulbs are different. Use bulbs rated for outdoors, since they need to handle moisture.
Check the base size. Most bulbs use the standard screw-in base, but some fixtures need smaller ones, so check before you buy.
Have fun with it. Flickering flame-effect LED bulbs look like candlelight in a lantern or chandelier, without the fire risk.
Look at the glass. A frosted globe diffuses light evenly, while bubbly or wavy glass reflects light with more character.
Your eyes change with age. If you need more light than you used to, that's normal. Go brighter.
Change Your Lighting Before You Repaint
You could have the best interior designer in the world, but if the lighting is off, the room won't feel right. Lighting changes how every paint color looks, so if you're planning new fixtures and new paint, do the lights first. Otherwise, you might spend thousands on paint and then hate it under your new lights.
And if a room feels too dim or "icky," try swapping the bulb before anything else. It might be a warm bulb with low lumens, and a brighter bulb could fix it in five minutes.
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Full Episode Transcript
This transcript was generated automatically and lightly edited, so it may contain small errors.
All right. Welcome, folks. Welcome to How to Handyma'am, the podcast where we don't advise you follow the light, but we do advise you follow our advice. In this episode, we're going to talk about all of the science involved with lighting. Where to put your lights, what color lighting you should have, how bright it should be. We're going to cover all of it today and make it easier when you're in the light bulb section at the store. I'm Arly. I'm Emily. And I'm Samantha.
This episode is dedicated to my cousin Heather, who is a really interesting, amazing human being. We love all of our family, but some family members we would pick even if they weren't family, and she's one of those. She's incredibly smart and interested in a lot of different things. She helps out with a STEM robotics program that her girls participate in. She's mom to two grown sons and two daughters who aren't grown quite yet, and she has a set of twins, just like I do. Some people are just high-quality individuals, amazing in every way, and my cousin Heather is like that. I'm super thankful she's both my cousin and my friend. Everybody needs a few more Heathers in their life. So true.
The purpose of this podcast is to empower women to take care of their homes. Arly grew up handy, but my mom and I, six years ago, didn't have any of these skills or tools. We were you six years ago, so that tells you you absolutely can do every bit of what we're doing. We want to be able to bring in-person education to women, and the podcast is our vehicle to get us started.
Welcome to Three Minutes of Chaos, where we say some handy stuff for approximately three minutes. A little longer than three minutes, but we're going to ignore that. Time is relative. I'd like you to each spend a minute telling me your grandest, most whimsical, craziest business idea.
Samantha, go. I would have a retail shop that has ice cream, and candy, and books, and puppies, and big overstuffed chairs where you're allowed to eat the food and hold the puppies. That's basically heaven for me. And it's like a speakeasy. You need a special word to get in. Are you allowed to eat the candy and touch the books before you buy them? You don't even have to buy them. You just come hang out and read. How profitable will that be? You didn't say it had to be profitable. That's fair. I yield my time to the senator from Michigan.
Okay, Arly. Well, you kind of took my idea. I would create an ethical zoo in an old, abandoned mega mall. You could go into the snake room, the bunny room, a petting zoo. And they'd have fun friends. The donkey would be friends with a German shepherd, and the alpaca would be best friends with a parrot. We'd give the birds vocabulary school so they could talk to the guests, and we'd give them veterinary care, approximate human rights, and enough room to actually move. You should lean into the fun friends idea and call it the Odd Couple Petting Zoo, where every room has an odd couple. I love that.
Okay, my idea is sort of like Airbnb, but for people who want extra cozy spaces. You rent out a room with your friends to play board games, with a record player and snacks. Or if you want a personal movie theater experience, but you and your friends like talking through the movie, there's a movie theater room. Wait, I'm changing my idea with twenty seconds left. A cooking space, where people who love to cook can make as big a mess as they want, then pay, and someone else comes and cleans it up.
I was thinking about Arly's abandoned mall, but every old store is a special kind of room experience. One is full of board games and cards for you and your girlfriends. Another has puzzles and a record player. Another has all the snacks. And several of the rooms are the clean-up-after-yourself-not kitchens. I think this is the best Three Minutes of Chaos yet. All of our ideas could be accomplished in one abandoned mall. We split it in half: free-roaming animals on one side and the clean spaces on the other. With a vestibule in between that sucks all the pet fur off of you. Install that at my house.
All right, is it time for Handy Vocab? This is going to bring some light to this topic. This segment is where we unpack a few words before we dive into the main teaching. First is Kelvins, which is the temperature of your light. That's K-E-L-V-I-N, so it's different from your friend Kelvin. Then lumens, which is the amount of visible light, so basically the brightness of your light bulbs. Then watts, which is energy consumption, so how much energy a light fixture or bulb uses.
When you say temperature, do you mean heat, or how warm or cool the light is? Warm or cool. It's usually on the box, like 2,500K to whatever, and it tells you the temperature of your light. The higher numbers are daylight, and those burn your retinas out of your head. Or you're me and you love it.
Then we have pendants, which are a type of light fixture. It's basically a light bulb on a necklace. Then recessed lights, which are like a pancake light that sits flush with your ceiling. And then sconces, which are basically wall lamps. If you've ever watched Indiana Jones, there are torches on the sides of the cave. It's basically like that, on the side of your wall. Those are our terms for today.
We're going to start with the three types of lighting layers. This is to make your home feel super homey and also very functional. From a lighting perspective, we like to have options. I was thinking about Emily the entire time I was researching this, because Emily is one of those people who doesn't want the big light on. Big light hater. I feel that deep in my soul. But I'm also on Samantha's page when I'm doing tasks. She likes to have all of the lights on all of the time.
So there's ambient lighting, which is basically so you can function in a room. You can see where your feet are and what's in front of you. The big light, basically. Then there's task lighting, which is light for a specific purpose. If you have a desk and do a lot of writing, it's usually in a corner, so you want a lamp on your desk so the shadow from the main light doesn't sit on top of your notebook. And then there's accent lighting, which is decorative. Either the lamp itself is decorative, or it shines on a picture or some architectural feature of your house.
I really thought about this in my living room, because I have two lights. One is a little lamp behind me, and one is the main light. Neither is right, because one is decorative and one is ambient, but I didn't have any task lighting. So you didn't have good light right where you are, like if you were sewing or crocheting. Exactly, and that's where I do all my sewing, crocheting, and notebook writing.
Our lighting layers can also be complemented by what I'm going to call vibe lights, also known as color temperature. You know how a hospital has bright white lights, but a cozy coffee shop has warmer lights? I was telling my husband, Lucas, the other day: this is why people like Starbucks. From the outside, when it's dark, it looks so cozy in there because of all the warm lighting. It invites you in.
You want to match the function and purpose of your light fixture with the light temperature. If you're doing something functional, you may want something on the cooler side, a little more like daylight, so around 3,500K to 5,000K. When you're shopping for light bulbs, there's usually a little scale on the box, indicated by a capital K. And some bulbs now have little switches on the side, so one bulb can switch between a warmer color and a cooler color.
Can I clarify something really quick? Someone told me they didn't understand what cool versus warm tone means. Cool tone means you're headed toward blue. Blue, green, and purple are cool colors. That soft yellow light people like is a warm-toned light, because red, yellow, and orange are warm colors. So it's kind of the difference between candlelight and daylight. Candlelight is yellow, soft, and warm, and daylight is bluish and bright. And with Kelvins, you're only talking about the color, not the brightness.
Brightness is something different, and it's indicated by lumens. So there are three things on your packaging: Kelvins, lumens, and watts. That's too many things. Just give me a light bulb. In my opinion, it is a little too many. To be honest, I'd get the one with the sliding scale. They're a little more expensive, but you can put the same bulb in all of your light fixtures and set it cooler in the kitchen and warmer next to your bed. Even the lamp on the end table in your TV room could be warm while you're watching TV, then switched to a cooler, brighter tone if you're doing a project there.
Or if you're me, every light in your house is soft white. Daylight bulbs do not enter our household. I respect that. That's why, when I put your light bulb back today after looking at it, I switched it all the way back to 2,500.
So basically, the lower your Kelvins, the warmer, cozier, and more inviting the vibe. The cooler and bluer the color, the more functional and sterile it feels. It has to do with our circadian rhythm, which is really cool. Our brains recognize bright daylight as, oh, we're awake. Warmer tones are like sunrise and sunset, when our bodies start to wind down.
Okay, very quickly, watts. If you have a fixture, like a lamp, that says sixty watts, you can't put in a bulb that's a hundred watts. It won't function correctly. But you can go lower than sixty. A lot of regular-looking bulbs nowadays are about eight watts, because they're LED. Also, I have an LED answer: light-emitting diode. There we go.
It used to be when people picked light bulbs, they'd pick forty, sixty, seventy-five, or a hundred watts. We basically had one white light bulb available to us, chosen by wattage, and you didn't want to go higher than your lamp was designed for, because it could explode the bulb. Now watts aren't quite as important, because LED bulbs need such a small amount of wattage compared to incandescent bulbs. It's just energy consumption, which is why people switching to LED save money on electricity. Some of the boxes said as bright as a traditional sixty-watt bulb, but it only uses eight watts. That's crazy.
So for a kitchen, which light bulbs should you choose? Can lights, you want bright, because those are your overhead lights for tasks. Under-cabinet lighting, I'd pick a dimmer one. I think of those as a night light. But they're really for lighting your work surface. That's fair. I also have a kitchen lamp, because cozy vibes are maxed. That sounds about right.
Kitchen lights should be fairly bright, with a pretty high lumen, because they're highly functional. You don't want to cut your finger off while you're chopping. Here's what I learned about placement: for your ambient lighting, you want uniform lights that sit in line with your counter, so when you're at the counter, the light isn't shining from behind you and you're not shadowing over your work. So you're talking about can lights that run along the ceiling above the counter, so the light is between you and what you're doing, rather than behind you? Yes. If you're standing at the edge of the counter and look up, the light is basically in your face.
Pendant lights are used a lot over islands, because islands aren't lit up quite as well. But nowadays, with LEDs in your recessed lights, you usually have enough light that you don't always need a pendant. And I didn't realize this, but under-cabinet lights should actually be placed at the very front of the cabinets. Every one I've seen has been in the very back. Apparently they're more useful at the front, because then they shine on your task instead of your backsplash.
Okay, the living room. Any guesses? Lamp, lamp, lamp, lamp shaped like a house. She's just naming Emily's preferences. I have five in my little living room alone. I love that for you. I like having an overhead light for when you need overall light. I only turn the overhead on when I need to do something medical to one of my animals, or when I'm vacuuming and want to see really well.
Here's a fun bit of information that I feel like Emily already knows. It's called perimeter washing. It's recessed lighting, so it's your ambient light, but it's placed toward the edges of your room so it shines on your walls. It draws attention to the edges of the room and makes it feel bigger and roomier. When I'm planning lighting for a room, I think about where the dark spots are, and then I put a lamp there. I got a floor lamp for the corner of our sitting room because I realized that was a darker corner. And my record player setup has a light, so I guess I do task lighting, just not overhead.
For floor and table lamps, they say to put the bottom of the shade just below your eye level when you're sitting, so you're never blinded by it. How do you do that with a floor lamp, since they're taller? I'm assuming most are adjustable, or they're far enough from where you sit that you're not looking right at the bulb. My lights have a remote that changes the color and the temperature. It's pretty fancy.
They also say not to put any lights in front of your television. If you want, you can put LED strips behind it. Mine's backlit with orange lights, for max cozy vibes. It's not strictly necessary, but it's a fun little flourish, and LED strips aren't that expensive. There are even ones that sync with your TV, so if a lightsaber comes out on screen, they light up red in that direction. That belongs in one of our abandoned mall rooms.
Then the bedroom. Your ambient light, your first layer, should be placed along your pathways, like from your side of the bed to the door, all your paths of travel. Then you want sconces or lamps by your bed. Either you need a sconce or a lamp next to your bed, or a light switch you can reach. Who turns off the light and then runs to their bed? I just walk to my bed in the dark. Even for me, who loves overhead lights, if you're lying in bed reading and the light is overhead, it's right in your eyes. So I'm on team bedroom lamps.
For your closet, they say to put lights about two to three feet out from the wall, pointed toward your clothes, and to use a slightly higher Kelvin, a little more like daylight, so colors look true. That makes sense, so you can tell the difference between black and navy. Or you just grab your phone flashlight.
And then the bathroom. What's the one bathroom lighting rule? Don't have the vanity light right over you, so you don't get ghoulish shadows. Yes, unless it's Halloween and you want that. They say the best lighting is a sconce on either side, just above your head, so it shines on you the way the sun would, with a daylight sort of color. So a little higher Kelvin. And Emily says no. I just have warm lights with high lumens. My kitchen is warm lighting, but it's super bright. So I do have bright lights. They're just not surgery-center colored.
I'd say for a bathroom, a soft, warm light, around 3,000 to 3,500K, which is still warm. I don't like blue. Put a blue-toned light right over you, and you'll look like a ghoul with the palest skin of your life and all your veins popping. I think 3,000 is pretty close to the warm range, but it's a good color for a bathroom even if you want the rest of your house to feel warm. You look a little more like you're outside. The easiest example is daylight versus candlelight for cool versus warm, and a dimmer all the way up or down for brightness. Same color, just brighter. So you can have warm lights with high lumens and still be cozy.
So hopefully this helps you buy the right light bulbs and fixtures. If something feels off in a room, think about what kind of lights you have there. We have one room in our house with a warm bulb and low lumens, so it just feels dim and kind of icky. It doesn't bother my husband at all, but when I'm working in the dining room, I'm like, why is it so dim in here? Just swap the bulb. I know, but that would mean moving the table and getting a ladder.
And age affects what kind of light you need. I'm twenty-three years older than Emily, so when she hands me her phone with the brightness all the way down, I'm like, how can you see that? And she's like, how can you not? You can also set your phone to a warm tone at night.
A couple other things to know: there are bulbs for specific purposes. If you're putting bulbs outside, use ones rated for outdoors, because of moisture. And there are a few different sizes of bases, the screw-in part. Most are the traditional size, but some fixtures need the little baby ones. And on a whimsical note, you can get flickering bulbs that look like a flame, in all kinds of sizes, indoor and outdoor. For a Halloween party, we switched all our bulbs to purple or flickering ones, and the whole house flickered like candlelight. I'd totally put those on my front porch at night. I've seen people put them in chandeliers in their dining rooms, so it looks like a bunch of old-fashioned candles, but you won't burn your house down.
Lighting is so important. You could have the best interior designer in the world design a room for you, and if the lighting is off, it won't feel right. So if your house doesn't feel right, you probably don't need to change your paint color to make it brighter or cozier. You probably need to adjust your lighting first. And if you're getting new lights and painting at the same time, do the lights first, because lighting really affects how your paint looks. Can you imagine spending thousands of dollars painting your house, then changing your light fixtures and hating all your paint?
Also think about the glass when you switch out a fixture. A bubbly or wavy glass globe makes the light more reflective, with more character. A frosted globe dulls it and makes it more even. I want my light diffused, so I like frosted, but I also really like the look of glass with air bubbles in it.
Hopefully you learned a lot and you're ready to tackle your next trip to the hardware store for light bulbs. And I totally understand if there's one room where you haven't changed the bulbs in weeks because you don't want to. I believe in you. We have a new YouTube series out, tutorials for people with no prerequisite experience. We're not assuming you know how to use a drill. We're teaching you the parts of your drill. So head on over to our YouTube, and if you're already here, make sure to subscribe. We love you, we hope you have a great day, and we'll see you soon.
