Jennifer Sheahan: Your lighting and electrical layout can transform your home

For first-time renovators, choosing where to place switches, sockets and wiring will take place earlier than you think. Once plaster goes up, it's often too late to decide

LED strips provide ambient lighting in the living room at Sheahan's home in Rathmines. Pictures: Moya Nolan 

Lighting design and electrical layouts are too often left to the last minute. For first-time renovators, your contractor or electrician will probably come to you much earlier than you expect, asking you to decide roughly where you want your switches and sockets and wiring to go — a.k.a the “first fix” stage. The first fix stage of a renovation is when all the wiring goes into the walls, before the plastering goes up; so the rough positioning of your lighting, appliances, switches, sockets, and data points needs to be decided at this point. Once plaster goes up, moving anything becomes messy and expensive. That is why waiting until the decorating stage to decide on your lighting plan is often too late.

You don’t need to have final decisions made at this point — you don’t need to have chosen your fixtures and lampshades, and faceplates yet. What you do need to have decided is approximate locations, and making this decision is less about technical knowledge and more about spending some time assessing how you plan to live in the space.