Enhancing Your Home with Outdoor Lighting

One of our priorities when we purchased our current home was to have a large, flat driveway. We succeeded! In fact, we joke that we have an airport landing strip with our double circle drive and another that leads to the garage doors. While I don’t love asphalt, it is perfect for this season of our lives. We spend countless hours on our driveway watching the girls use the runway/race track with their bicycles, tricycles and scooters. I wanted to pull into the driveway and feel a sense of peace, so we used outdoor lighting and seating to add charm and function to our driveway.

First, a before and during. I didn’t think to take a photograph of the side of the house before we painted it, but you get the idea!

After:

All of the garages in our neighborhood are on either side of the home. Our garage is the first thing you see when you turn the bend on the street approaching our home. Let’s face it, garages and driveways can be boring. We opted to replace our garage doors with basic doors rather than carriage doors to save on cost and painted them the same color as our house. All I could see when we pulled into the drive was old, dated black light fixtures which only seemed to highlight the blacktop.

You’ll find ingredient amount and recipe instructions in printable recipe card below.

We selected custom copper lanterns to make our garages more of a feature than an eyesore, placing them between each door. Natural metals are timeless and I just love the details of these! I used candle light bulbs to mimic gas lanterns encompassed in a hurricane. The new lanterns draw your eyes up away from the asphalt. It’s almost like they’re calling me home!

I also added planters between the garage doors to compliment our home and filled them with gardenia topiaries, distracting from the drive. It makes the area feel more like a relaxing patio, especially when paired with weathered wood chairs for Chris and I to enjoy a glass of wine while the girls play.

Day and night, our new outdoor lighting has transformed the side of our home and adds so much ambience! It’s amazing what a little lighting can do. You may recall that we also used these fixtures on our deck and created a similar, but larger style for our front porch. It’s fun to watch them weather over time and add character to our home.

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