Let there be Light!

Well once the difficulty with the direction of the joist was done it became a much more straight forward task.  Running the three new gang boxes was not that hard, just a bit messy cutting into the drywall.  A circle cutter on a rotary tool sure makes a nice cut-out though!



So here is the garage with the 6 new lights on at about 7:30 pm on a summer evening.






Here on the right you can see how each original position now has another fixture in front of it

And here you can see from the other direction.

So 6 fixtures, 12 32w T8 bulbs makes for a nice improvement on the original lighting.  There is still room to easily add an additional 3 gang boxes back in the direction of the garage doors if needed. 

For now I'll just go with this.

It's always something

Well,  my first thought was to mount these lights with three in the current location and then put two others in the opposite orientation in between the car bays, that would give light in the space between cars.

Well one tip I' have now it to investigate fully the direction of you ceiling joists and also the joist material.  As it turns out in order to run flexible wire in the ceiling from the current fixture over to a new gang box over the spaces  between the bays, I have to get through multiple joist as they run from the front to the back of the garage in the direction of the cars!

To make matters worse  I tried with one by removing a small 4" strip of drywall and found one area of 8" think laminated beam.  This obviously was a major load bearing beam for the guest bedroom above the garage.

So a change of plans I will now run the wire to new gang boxes that are located within the same joist space to make this job much easier.  So I will run the wire about 4' forward and drop in new gang boxes like these for adding boxes to existing walls.




We'll go with that plan and I'll show you the finished product.

Can you see what your doing

I guess the first thing I wanted to start with is lighting.  Most people will agree you just can't have enough.  Here I share some of my experience with doing an upgrade to the typical "builder installed" garage lighting.

This is typically the type of thing you will be starting with.

This is a 3 car garage with some outdoor lighting each with 2, 100 watt bulbs located directly over the car bays.  Bad on multiple counts,  incandescent lights, poor placement, and just inadequate.

While you could toss all kinds of money at this job, my intention was to get good bang for the buck, so I wanted to solve the most problems for the least cost and the easiest install.

Easiest would be just to toss 3 replacement fixtures into these existing spots but that doesn't help with the placement.  If you are working on the cars you'll need light from multiple position to fill in shadows.  So just 3 larger, brighter was not the idea.



So I decide to go with 6, 2x32 watt fixture, using 2 per bay. These were purchase for a local home center, at $19.99 each they are cheap enough.  The 4x32 fixture were almost triple in cost so I decide to go with 2x32 to save money and spread the lighting.  So the lights and bulbs come to about $135.

Next we get into the layout and install.  Of course nothing goes as planned!