Lighting, Light Fixtures, Ceiling and Exhaust Fans - Lighting in family room

I need help in lighting my new family room.

The dimension of the room is 19.5W x 17L x 10H
Furnitures in the room are leather sofa, loveseat, 2 chairs, end tables, coffee table and a big screen TV on a TV console.
Currently we only have one center ceiling light. We wish to add more lighting to create some ambiance for everyday activities and entertaining too.

We want to add some recessed lights and some eyeball trims to highlight the art works. But we are not sure how to place those. Please help us light up our family room.

Thank you.

A lot depends on how much light you want and what activities you plan for the room. If you like to do jigsaw puzzles on the floor in the middle of the room, it would clearly take more light.

Light for everyday activities and entertaining would be called general lighting. Light for your artwork would be called accent lighting. I suggest you provide separate switches for the two. I also suggest your general lighting be on one or more dimmers.

Accent lighting should of course be placed directly over the artwork, about two to three feet out from the wall.

For general lighting, divide your ceiling into an imaginary grid of nearly-square equal-sized rectangles. Put a light in the middle of each square. I'd suggest no more than six lights per switch, so if you end up with more than six, use more than one switch. As I said before, I suggest you use dimmers. The size of the rectangles depends on the amount of light desired, the height of the ceiling, the type of activities, the color of the walls, etc. You can go anywhere from 5x5 grids to 10x10 grids.

You might also consider the third main category of lighting: task lighting. If you typically read in a favorite chair, you could put a light over that (although it's probably better to use floor or table lamps for that).

When I built my media room I used recessed lighting and didn't take reflectivity into account. Consequently there are four annoying reflections on the TV screen whenever the overhead recessed lights are on. They are on dimmers, but they still cleary show up even when they're dimmed to almost nothing. Fortunately there are two other sets of dimmed lights (perimeter/accent and over the bar) that I can use to create a nice ambience in the room.

If I had it to do over, I would use a flashlight or other portable light source to make sure the placement of the fixtures won't reflect in the TV.

If I had it to do over, I would use a flashlight or other portable light source to make sure the placement of the fixtures won't reflect in the TV.

This is the best suggestion I have seen in a long time! Such things are the last thing I've thought about when placing lights and end up having to go to great lengths after the fact to eliminate glare. It never occurred to me to make sure such things didn't happen in the first place. :o

If you use eyeball trim, you can usually eliminate the glare. Rick can probably still use this solution, even though the job is now complete.

Thanks, John. I tried that. The problem really lies with the TV. It's a 35-inch CRT, so the screen has a nice convex curve to it that picks up every little reflection. I keep telling my wife we need a new flat screen, but she's not going for it. ;)