Sparks Fly: Shedding some light

This time of the year is always a bit busy... trying to buy gifts, make plans, get ready for Christmas, etc. So, it should be no surprise that my house is in disarray and dirty, nothing is put away, and I have a million things on my to-do list. Tis the season, right? Maybe all of this is my excuse for why I haven't written. I have been trying to get Christmas cards out. It always takes me way longer to do those than I expect when I start. I have also been on the phone with ebay and paypal over a dispute. I suppose I should have known better than to trust people, but I thought it would be a good Christmas idea for a certain J. Sigh. I may have to move onto plan b. On top of that, we need to get a roofer out to our house. Yup. I haven't shown you all the picture yet. However, Hurricane Sandy brought us lots of rain. And with that rain, we discovered a leak. I don't think it is a new leak, but it got the drywall in our bedoom. My dad and I went up to the attic over Thanksgiving, and discovered that the flashing around the chimney was going bad. I am of the opinion that we need a new roof. Ours is 27 years old, which means it's very much nearing its life expectancy (look at me, using it's and its in a sentence properly). However, replacing a roof in the winter is a bad idea. I want to get the flashing sealed up and then discuss what we can do in the spring. I also need to read our HOA guidelines on all that.

Okay, all of that was way off topic to the purpose of this post, which is the basement light. You may remember I cleaned up the basement a while back? Well, these things never last and it ended up looking like a major disaster again.

However, the more egregious part of the whole setup was this light that we hit our heads on every time we are in the basement. I can actually just barely stand up in the space down there. J has to hunch down.

So, we (my dad and I) installed new fluorescent lights up into the beam spaces. We used hooks into the particle board flooring.

Which then hooked onto the light. We actually ended up using S-hooks on the light instead of the chain so that the light would be as high as possible.

Installed between the beams.

This is after the first one went in. We discovered that the beams limited the light in the space, and needed to add one more to the right of this picture.

First, we fixed some of the wiring. We added a new hole to move the box with the existing switch to a new location out of the way.

And then wired on an outlet to it for the fluorescent lights instead of the incandescent. The outlet faceplates are sold at Home Depot. We actually got a new electrical box as well.

We used a piece of trim to offset the box, so that the outlet would lay flat. You can see where the fluorescent plugs in.

And here is our second light.

Both lights on!

J and I then spent some time organizing, getting rid of junk and taking some stuff up to the attic. I hated to start using the attic, but we are going to try to be careful about not throwing too much crap up there. But, for now, we have a much nicer work area. I also plan on moving Christmas stuff up to the attic after Christmas, which will free up even more room.