One of my long-queued-up projects was to replace our living room lights. I'm being generous calling them lights. It's a stand-up lamp really.
Do you disagree? There is one outlet that is switched by a light switch (not the one in the picture but we'll be getting back to that guy shortly) into which this lamp is plugged into. Due to the need to plug into this outlet and where our couch needs to be, the lamp ends up in an awful location. Namely, it is in front of that thermostat and tends to amp up the temperature by several degrees just in that vicinity thus tricking the heater into thinking it doesn't need to run when in fact it does and we're freezing our tails off. Moreover, those two bulbs are supposed to light all of this:
To which I say, "Yeah right." I dread trying to scrapbook from that dining table; it feels as if I've gone back to pre-Industrial Revolution and am working by candlelight. If my mother were here, she'd tell me how I was wrecking my eyes with the bad light.
So we cooked up a grand plan to:
- Tie off the outlet such that it would no longer be controlled by the switch and thus always be "ON".
- Pull a new power line (on the existing outlet circuit) for a set of 7 recessed lights over the living area controlled by 2 3-way switches
- Pull off another new power line (also on the existing circuit) for a set of track lights over the dining area controlled by another set of 2 3-way switches.
- Enlarge the switch box controlling the outlet to hold 2 switches.
- Finally, move the switch in the first picture (which actually controls the back porch light) to the left side of the stud it's nailed to and enlarge it to hold 3 switches: 2 new and the 1 existing. Moving it is necessary as it's currently located snug between two studs and has no room to expand.
We ran this plan by Travis's Dad (who's an architect and has some expertise in these matters) just to make sure it was sane and he felt it sounded ok.
So early Friday morning, we made a round of all the local hardware stores and this was our haul.
Our first task was to pick out roughly where we'd like the new recessed lights. We had already thought about this enough that we knew we would need 7 lights. If you don't have any idea how many lights you want, do this before buying materials.
Knowing we wanted 7 and the rough arrangement we wanted, we grabbed some dessert-sized paper plates we had lying around, put some tape on the back, and started popping them onto the ceiling so we could see how they looked together. This made it easy to play with spacing and alignment with the furniture in the room.
Once we settled on a arrangement we liked, we took our stud finder up there to locate the joists and beams that we'd have to avoid when drilling holes, lined up the holes neatly, and finalized placement.
Separately, we needed to find the wires supplying power to the outlet switch. To do this, we killed this circuit's breaker, opened up the junction box of wires going into the house, and started scanning wires with our Christmas tree light fixer. It has a built-in EMF detector for locating which light on a line is burnt out which is in essence the same as detecting which line doesn't have a current running through it since the breaker is off. That little sucker has more than paid for itself now.
We put Travis's new "multi-tool" to use to cut our new switch box openings with great results.
We cut a brand new, 3-gang opening and got mighty lucky -- the kitchen switch is just behind this location but just more one switch box lower. Phew. This turned out to be even more lucky when we went to locate where to drill for the new drops later on since we could use the kitchen lines to locate the new hole location. We cut the old switch box out of the wall, using the multi-tool to slice through the nails. The porch light switch box had 3 lines of Romex coming into it, two of which were tied together. These could basically stay in place but the last line needed to be wired into the switch which meant it would have to cross over 2 2x4's into our new 3-gang opening. To do this, we drilled a hole through those studs with a spade bit. The existing wire actually didn't have enough slack to cross over so we actually just wired in a short section of Romex. To protect these connections in the wall, we used a "handy box" to contain the connections.
For the existing switch box, we had to cut out the nails holding in the old box and widen the opening so it would accept a 2-gang switch box. This box only had one line coming in -- it is essentially the terminal point of this circuit. Since we just wanted an outlet that was always on, once we removed the existing switch, all we had to do was hard wire the black and white wires together and toss the switch.
At this point, we'd exhausted the various things we could do down below and it was time for Travis to head into the attic. With all the Romex in hand, a fish line, and a drill with an extender and a spade bit, he started crawling around and yelling at me from the attic. With a bit of knocking on the ceiling and using the kitchen wires as reference points, we located where he needed to drill. So he drilled. And drilled. And drilled some more. We'd forgotten to take note that there was a header (a very large chunk of wood) in the path of the drops. So even with this drill setup running about 12 inches long, Travis couldn't make it all the way through.
Not to mention, he lost the spade bit at some point during drilling. We did manage to recover the bit later on after buying a much longer extender and made it all the way through.
To make the drops, Travis taped together all the wires that needed to come down and threaded the fishing line through, securing it with more tape, paying special attention to creating a tapered transition from the fishing line to the Romex and covering any exposed wire ends to prevent snags. Then he dropped the start of the fish line down until I could get it and I yanked while he fed until we'd pulled a few feet through the switch opening.
Next up, with a utility knife, some wire cutter/strippers, a Phillips head screwdriver, and a pair of needle-nosed pliers, we started wiring together our switches. The Romex had to be threaded through the holes in our switch box and the switch box placed into position in the wall first. We bought these switch boxes designed for use with remodels (vs. new construction).
Notice the two flaps on top of the box (one is rotated vertically). The flaps lay down on the box for insertion into the wall and when you tighten the screws, the flaps flip up. As you screw further, they clamp against the drywall. Notice the series of, on this particular model, 4 lips at the top and bottom of the box which clamp from the outside.
With the box in the wall, it was time to strip the outer Romex insulation to expose some number of wires. In this case, it's the hop over from the patio switch so there's a black (hot), white (neutral), and bare copper (ground). You'll want to strip about half an inch or so from the black and white wires. This exposes just enough material to make a strong connection but not so much that you may cause short circuits. Remember, erring on the side of stripping too little material is easier to fix. Then we made a U shape out of the tip of each exposed wire and attached it to the switch. Our switches are new enough that the screws are color coded to an extent. For example, in this picture, the green screw signifies ground. Read the instructions if you're uncertain or better yet, get an electrician.
It gets harder as you have less and less switches to wire in a single box because there's just less space for you to squeeze your hands into. Perhaps that's why I found I was quite adept at wiring these things since I have tiny hands. But now I have about a dozen scrapes and nicks on my hands to show for it.
At this point, we felt it was a good checkpoint and decided to throw the breaker back on and test a few switches. We had a porch light we could test to make sure we hadn't shorted anything out and also checked that the outlet was now on. All that was left for this little panel is to pop a face plate on it and call it done. I think it's well worth it to spring for the "preferred" face plates as they're labeled at Home Depot. They're much larger and more forgiving of drywall-sins.
We've finally gotten to the recessed light installation. Unfortunately, this is also where the pictures go on hiatus (the reason for which will soon become self-evident).
I sent Travis into the attic to clear insulation in each spot we were installing a light to prevent it from falling into the living room once we drilled holes. I found however that I lack the strength and/or confidence to competently operate a 6" hole saw. This meant all I was drilling where pilot holes and Travis would have to come down and drilling the ceiling cutouts before heading back into the attic to help me run the lines between lights. All in all, this meant it took use a couple hours to get 7 holes cut in the ceiling.
For the recessed light housings, I could wire it up partially in the living room. These lights would be wired in parallel such that if one burnt out, the others could keep running. This means that at every light except for the last light in the run, there three sets of wires that should be connected: line from the previous light/switch, line to the next light, the current light. (The light in the last run doesn't have a line to the next light because it's the last light.) Thus three black wires had to be connected together and same goes for three white wires and three copper grounds. On the ground, I could get the line to the next light wired in. However, the line from the previous light/switch had to be wired in with the light dangling. Because of all this, I used these push-in wire connectors instead of possibly the more popular wire nuts. I've heard some electricians don't like these push-ins but I was very happy with their performance, especially in this application. These allowed me to wire together two wires on the ground and then add a third wire later whereas wire nuts require all wires to be present in order to tie them together. Also, the push-in connectors held nicely to being tugged on in mid-air without coming loose. I can't imagine trying to screw wire nuts while on a step stool while support a light housing and fiddling with 3 sets of wires.
The real tricky part came with push the clips of the housings out so it would hold itself up against the drywall. The housings won't stay up unless you hold them up or the clips have been set in. This means until a set of lights are in, either I have to hold them up from below or Travis has to hold them from above. This means I basically spent the entire afternoon holding my arms above my head and having Travis yell, "Are you ready to push?" to me. Never would I have imagined that phrase yelled at me so much without me being pregnant.
But working with my arms over my head gets really exhausting, really fast. So let's just say that I had my moments where I thought we'd just have to give in and call someone to clip the light housing in because I just didn't think we'd make it. Travis finally discovered the secret to getting the clips in (see the Lesson section at the bottom) and we forged ahead. Around 4:30pm, Day 2, we found our groove with these housings and were able to pop them up in about 15-20 minutes.
Once we finished the housing, we completed the power connections in the junction box in the garage and flipped on the breakers to check out how we did. We stole some light bulbs from the kitchen which take identical bulbs and started trying out our hookups. (We didn't want to commit to the same light bulbs as the kitchen as we weren't sure we would want our living room to be so bright. We were right and found we needed a softer white.)
Miraculously the electrical connections worked. Unfortunately, we bought the wrong trim kits. So early the next morning, we grabbed 7 light bulbs, swapped out for 7 trim kits that actually fit and wrapped up the install.
You may be wondering how our dogs coped through all this commotion. The short answer is they did well.
Both dogs tried to eat a little insulation but luckily weren't really taken with the taste or texture and gave it up quickly. It looks like we'll be able to attempt more projects with these two. You know. Once we recover from this one. Which will take a while.
Lesson #12 in Home Remodeling: Electricity, 3-Way Switches, Recessed Lights, and etc.
I'm afraid I don't have a pithy title for this lesson. It's just a smorgasbord of all the little things I wish someone had told me.
So early Friday morning, we made a round of all the local hardware stores and this was our haul.
Our first task was to pick out roughly where we'd like the new recessed lights. We had already thought about this enough that we knew we would need 7 lights. If you don't have any idea how many lights you want, do this before buying materials.
Knowing we wanted 7 and the rough arrangement we wanted, we grabbed some dessert-sized paper plates we had lying around, put some tape on the back, and started popping them onto the ceiling so we could see how they looked together. This made it easy to play with spacing and alignment with the furniture in the room.
Once we settled on a arrangement we liked, we took our stud finder up there to locate the joists and beams that we'd have to avoid when drilling holes, lined up the holes neatly, and finalized placement.
Separately, we needed to find the wires supplying power to the outlet switch. To do this, we killed this circuit's breaker, opened up the junction box of wires going into the house, and started scanning wires with our Christmas tree light fixer. It has a built-in EMF detector for locating which light on a line is burnt out which is in essence the same as detecting which line doesn't have a current running through it since the breaker is off. That little sucker has more than paid for itself now.
We put Travis's new "multi-tool" to use to cut our new switch box openings with great results.
We cut a brand new, 3-gang opening and got mighty lucky -- the kitchen switch is just behind this location but just more one switch box lower. Phew. This turned out to be even more lucky when we went to locate where to drill for the new drops later on since we could use the kitchen lines to locate the new hole location. We cut the old switch box out of the wall, using the multi-tool to slice through the nails. The porch light switch box had 3 lines of Romex coming into it, two of which were tied together. These could basically stay in place but the last line needed to be wired into the switch which meant it would have to cross over 2 2x4's into our new 3-gang opening. To do this, we drilled a hole through those studs with a spade bit. The existing wire actually didn't have enough slack to cross over so we actually just wired in a short section of Romex. To protect these connections in the wall, we used a "handy box" to contain the connections.
For the existing switch box, we had to cut out the nails holding in the old box and widen the opening so it would accept a 2-gang switch box. This box only had one line coming in -- it is essentially the terminal point of this circuit. Since we just wanted an outlet that was always on, once we removed the existing switch, all we had to do was hard wire the black and white wires together and toss the switch.
At this point, we'd exhausted the various things we could do down below and it was time for Travis to head into the attic. With all the Romex in hand, a fish line, and a drill with an extender and a spade bit, he started crawling around and yelling at me from the attic. With a bit of knocking on the ceiling and using the kitchen wires as reference points, we located where he needed to drill. So he drilled. And drilled. And drilled some more. We'd forgotten to take note that there was a header (a very large chunk of wood) in the path of the drops. So even with this drill setup running about 12 inches long, Travis couldn't make it all the way through.
Not to mention, he lost the spade bit at some point during drilling. We did manage to recover the bit later on after buying a much longer extender and made it all the way through.
To make the drops, Travis taped together all the wires that needed to come down and threaded the fishing line through, securing it with more tape, paying special attention to creating a tapered transition from the fishing line to the Romex and covering any exposed wire ends to prevent snags. Then he dropped the start of the fish line down until I could get it and I yanked while he fed until we'd pulled a few feet through the switch opening.
Next up, with a utility knife, some wire cutter/strippers, a Phillips head screwdriver, and a pair of needle-nosed pliers, we started wiring together our switches. The Romex had to be threaded through the holes in our switch box and the switch box placed into position in the wall first. We bought these switch boxes designed for use with remodels (vs. new construction).
Notice the two flaps on top of the box (one is rotated vertically). The flaps lay down on the box for insertion into the wall and when you tighten the screws, the flaps flip up. As you screw further, they clamp against the drywall. Notice the series of, on this particular model, 4 lips at the top and bottom of the box which clamp from the outside.
With the box in the wall, it was time to strip the outer Romex insulation to expose some number of wires. In this case, it's the hop over from the patio switch so there's a black (hot), white (neutral), and bare copper (ground). You'll want to strip about half an inch or so from the black and white wires. This exposes just enough material to make a strong connection but not so much that you may cause short circuits. Remember, erring on the side of stripping too little material is easier to fix. Then we made a U shape out of the tip of each exposed wire and attached it to the switch. Our switches are new enough that the screws are color coded to an extent. For example, in this picture, the green screw signifies ground. Read the instructions if you're uncertain or better yet, get an electrician.
It gets harder as you have less and less switches to wire in a single box because there's just less space for you to squeeze your hands into. Perhaps that's why I found I was quite adept at wiring these things since I have tiny hands. But now I have about a dozen scrapes and nicks on my hands to show for it.
At this point, we felt it was a good checkpoint and decided to throw the breaker back on and test a few switches. We had a porch light we could test to make sure we hadn't shorted anything out and also checked that the outlet was now on. All that was left for this little panel is to pop a face plate on it and call it done. I think it's well worth it to spring for the "preferred" face plates as they're labeled at Home Depot. They're much larger and more forgiving of drywall-sins.
We've finally gotten to the recessed light installation. Unfortunately, this is also where the pictures go on hiatus (the reason for which will soon become self-evident).
I sent Travis into the attic to clear insulation in each spot we were installing a light to prevent it from falling into the living room once we drilled holes. I found however that I lack the strength and/or confidence to competently operate a 6" hole saw. This meant all I was drilling where pilot holes and Travis would have to come down and drilling the ceiling cutouts before heading back into the attic to help me run the lines between lights. All in all, this meant it took use a couple hours to get 7 holes cut in the ceiling.
For the recessed light housings, I could wire it up partially in the living room. These lights would be wired in parallel such that if one burnt out, the others could keep running. This means that at every light except for the last light in the run, there three sets of wires that should be connected: line from the previous light/switch, line to the next light, the current light. (The light in the last run doesn't have a line to the next light because it's the last light.) Thus three black wires had to be connected together and same goes for three white wires and three copper grounds. On the ground, I could get the line to the next light wired in. However, the line from the previous light/switch had to be wired in with the light dangling. Because of all this, I used these push-in wire connectors instead of possibly the more popular wire nuts. I've heard some electricians don't like these push-ins but I was very happy with their performance, especially in this application. These allowed me to wire together two wires on the ground and then add a third wire later whereas wire nuts require all wires to be present in order to tie them together. Also, the push-in connectors held nicely to being tugged on in mid-air without coming loose. I can't imagine trying to screw wire nuts while on a step stool while support a light housing and fiddling with 3 sets of wires.
The real tricky part came with push the clips of the housings out so it would hold itself up against the drywall. The housings won't stay up unless you hold them up or the clips have been set in. This means until a set of lights are in, either I have to hold them up from below or Travis has to hold them from above. This means I basically spent the entire afternoon holding my arms above my head and having Travis yell, "Are you ready to push?" to me. Never would I have imagined that phrase yelled at me so much without me being pregnant.
But working with my arms over my head gets really exhausting, really fast. So let's just say that I had my moments where I thought we'd just have to give in and call someone to clip the light housing in because I just didn't think we'd make it. Travis finally discovered the secret to getting the clips in (see the Lesson section at the bottom) and we forged ahead. Around 4:30pm, Day 2, we found our groove with these housings and were able to pop them up in about 15-20 minutes.
Once we finished the housing, we completed the power connections in the junction box in the garage and flipped on the breakers to check out how we did. We stole some light bulbs from the kitchen which take identical bulbs and started trying out our hookups. (We didn't want to commit to the same light bulbs as the kitchen as we weren't sure we would want our living room to be so bright. We were right and found we needed a softer white.)
Miraculously the electrical connections worked. Unfortunately, we bought the wrong trim kits. So early the next morning, we grabbed 7 light bulbs, swapped out for 7 trim kits that actually fit and wrapped up the install.
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| New track light over the dining area. These spotlights work well for our paintings but I need to get some replacement LED bulbs from the interwebs. I'm not a fan of halogen. I also need to pick up a few pendant light track fitters in this bronze color which is proving to be next to impossible to find, even with the interwebs. The track light installation itself was pretty standard box-instruction-following. The only special thing we did was to install a ceiling pan (a fancy name for a metal dish with some pre-perforated holes you can knock out to thread wire through meant for attaching light fixtures to) and drop in the new Romex to power these lights. |
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| You can see the baffle-ing in the trim kit we picked out. We went with a flat white all the way up over the kind we have in the kitchen which switch to a metallic reflector surface about halfway up. We wanted to soften the light coming out of the living room cans versus intensifying it as the reflectors do. |
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| Our finished lights over the fireplace. |
You may be wondering how our dogs coped through all this commotion. The short answer is they did well.
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| Remi mostly slept in his bed. Even when his bed was covered by the canvas drop clothes, he managed to find it and sleep thereabouts. He was a bit frightened by the loud noises: drilling, sawing, hammering, vacuuming, and the vibrations those caused. Perhaps he needs a Thundershirt. Kidding. |
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| Pixie puttered around, alternately chewing on pieces of stripped rubber insulation or sighing and collapsing into bed. She was a bit nervous about Travis, covered in insulation climbing down from our attic. She also barked a few times when she heard Travis yelling from the attic thinking we had an intruder on our roof. |
Lesson #12 in Home Remodeling: Electricity, 3-Way Switches, Recessed Lights, and etc.
I'm afraid I don't have a pithy title for this lesson. It's just a smorgasbord of all the little things I wish someone had told me.
- Romex is labelled as [wire gauge]/[# of wires]. (American) wire gauge is an odd system. The larger the gauge number, the thinner the wire. Generally, 14 gauge wire is rated to handle up to 15 amps and 12 gauge wire is rated to handle up to 20 amps. The thicker the wire though, the stiffer it will be to handle. (Duh.) The packaging will label whether a ground wire is included (everything I saw at Home Depot does). This ground wire doesn't count towards the number of wires in the labeling. The minimum number of wires should be 2: one hot (black), one neutral (white). There are also those with 3 wires: 2 hots (usually colored black and red), one neutral. We needed these 3 wire ones to hop between our 3-way switches.
- When locating any boxes in the wall, look up, down, behind, and around. Just because you can't see any obstacles on the wall you're looking at around your location doesn't mean you're home free. There may be boxes, or appliances or plumbing behind or inside the wall. There also may be headers or cross-run wires above your location. A stud finder with a current detection alarm can often alert you to these cases but this can only work if the circuit breakers are all on. Even then, you only have a rough idea of where wires are. Remember, you can always cut a hole in the drywall, poke in a mirror and a flashlight and look around for yourself. At the end of the day, patching a hole in the drywall that didn't work out is far cheaper and less of a hassle than running into some wiring or plumbing in your walls.
- If you need to communicate and one of you is in the attic and the other one isn't, get a pair of walkie-talkies. It'll save a lot of frustration and perhaps prevent a stranding or two.
- Since we were dropping two sets of cables (one for the living room, one for the dining room), we arbitrarily picked cables that we labeled as for the living room as we dropped. This prevented any wire mix ups down the line, allowing us to get everything wired right the first time. It also allowed us to decide how we wanted the lines to go into the switch box and, by extension, what order the switches would operate in.
- If you're using extenders on your drill that don't have a locking feature, tape the heck out of it. It sure beats fishing bits out of awkward places, or worse yet, losing bits entirely.
- Draw a wiring diagram to help you understand the circuit. However, the tricky difference between wiring theory and wiring in practice is that a line of Romex contains two way of traffic. What does that mean? When you draw a wiring diagram, it has a line leaving the power source, makes a loop through your switch or outlet or light or whatever and then comes all the way back to the power sources. When you wire with Romex, you don't pull 2 lines of Romex from your power source to, say, your outlet. You just pull one because inside that one line of Romex, you have hot AND neutral (at a minimum -- see previous bullet). The hot is that line leaving the power source but the neutral is that line coming back to the power source. Romex helps you pull loops but takes some getting used to if you're stilling thinking in terms of physics class electrical diagrams. When you get really desparate, check out these wiring diagrams which were real life savers for us.
- When wiring switches, you'll make a loop of exposed wire to hook on a screw terminal. Make the loop in the clockwise direction of how you will turn the screw. Thus when you go to tighten the screw, the tightening motion encourages the loop to stay on the screw instead of trying to spit the loop out with each turn.
- When wiring up 3-way switches, you may want to have them configured such that when all the switches are down, the lights are off. I understand this isn't as important to other people as it is to my OCD-ness. Now when you wire 3 way switches to one another, you have to use Romex with 3 wires inside. The two hot wires create two potential paths between the 3-way switches which is what gives you the ability to turn on and off from 2 different spots. You may be tempted to think that it would be wise to wire the two switches consistently -- that is you wire the red wire to the same pole on both switches and black wire to the same pole on both switches. Well you would be wrong as I was. You would end up with a switch configuration that can only turn off if one switch is up and the other is down. You have to wire one switch opposite to the other.
- The recessed light housings for remodel installations are meant to slip through a small hole and then clip into position by compressing the drywall using the lip of the housing from the bottom and 4 push-in clips from above. Well neither I nor Travis were strong enough to push the clip into place or we were both just doing it wrong. The trick we finally discovered about 4 lights in was for Travis to use vise-grips to pull the clip both out and up from the attic side. Until discovering the secret of pulling up on the clip in addition to out, we sometimes got the clips to snap in but the pressure caused it to pop back out as soon as anything shifted or we let go.
