Day 1206: feeling a little light headed

With the living room and studio successfully swapped, we took a hard look at whether we needed to make any changes to the new studio. Like most rooms it had one central light. That might work in general but certainly doesn't in a room where work is being done in all corners. So one of the things we had our trusted handyman do is to install two lights in a diagonal pattern. (There's a plate in the middle covering the spot where the one light used to be.)

This also wasn't right because some areas were too bright and some still too dark. What to do, especially with our handyman unavailable for a few weeks? DIY.

There are various formulas for figuring the optimal lighting in a room. The short version is that we had to double--to four--the number of lights and make a square with them. Somewhat like the coax cable project, this had a nice part and a less nice part.

Step one after figuring the layout of the fixtures was to cut holes for the four new light boxes. You can eyeball this or if you want a really clean circle you can use a tool like this that scores the drywall. This has the nice benefit of scoring the paint as well, which reduces the chance of ruining it.

Then you use any sort of drywall saw to cut out your circle. (If the rubber gloves seem strange, we'll get to that.)

Once finished you'll end up with something like this.

Multiply by four in our case. You can see in the back right we ended up moving the fixture one foot over. One benefit of having the guys do at least the installation of the two lights was that they'd already tapped into the wiring for the original fixture (covered by the plate) meaning we'd just have to add wire to the end (basically) to connect lights #3 and #4.

Before moving onto the messier part of the project in the attic we did some prep work. We bought four of these light boxes for ceiling fixtures. The bar extends so you can attach it to two joists any distance apart.

While in the attic we figured that we would do something to largely close the holes where we were taking away the two light boxes that our guys installed. That was a reverse of the steps to cut the holes in the ceiling. Start with a piece of drywall.

Trace out your piece.

This time we cut away the parts outside the circle.

 Until we had two of them.

 

Then to keep them from falling through the holes in the ceiling, we glued a short piece of wood to the back. Once in the attic we glued the ends of the wood down to hold the patches in place. Some plaster over the circles and you'll hardly be able to tell they were there.

Here's where we stood before going into the attic. We had two old holes with live wires. We had four new holes with boxes. The gameplan was to move the wire in the back right into the new box next to it. That started our chain. From there we moved to the box in the front right, then to the front left, and finally to the back left. Make a square, what could be simpler?

As with the crawlspace part of the coax cable project, the devil is in the details. In this case our attic is a little tricky to work in because: 1) a previous owner have a love affair with insulation, making it hard to get around; 2) there is little wood running over the joists that you can sit/kneel on, so there was some precarious perching going on; 3) the roof has a very shallow pitch, so getting to the holes close to the outer wall required lying facedown in insulation to reach; and 4) the whole attic (like the crawlspace) is covered in Borax for insect control. So you end up working in an environment like this (hence the gloves to protect more against fiberglass cuts than Borax):

With all the wires strung through the four boxes, we could get back down to do the splicing. If you haven't worked with a regular 2 line (hot and neutral with a ground) wire it's not too hard. You really need only a couple tools: something to cut away the rubber coating and a wire stripper.

Here's the wire coming through the box.

Cut away a section of the outer, rubber coating to expose the lines. Make sure to give yourself enough maneuvering room to bend/twist the wires as needed once you attach the light fixture.

Strip off the ends of the hot (black) and neutral (white) wires so they can make a connection with the corresponding wires on the lamp.

One trick we picked up somewhere was to put electrical tape around the connecting nut to keep everything in place. When you're up on the ladder, have the lamp in one hand and the nuts in another, you run out of handy places to keep the tape. We saw someone use themselves as a repository and that works surprisingly well. It also makes you look a bit like a lop-sided soldier.

Anyway, with all the wires prepped and the four new fixtures in place the room looked like this:

And when we flipped the switch everything worked!