11/8/20 – Let there be light!!! This is where things started getting exciting. Lighting and electrical. You’ll notice all the pictures above are dark. That’s because the only lighting in the basement came from seven incandescent light bulbs. Time to change that. After many hours of research, another friend, who is an electrician and helped with the electrical work, suggested using these recessed LED light fixtures. They are not your typical LED can type fixtures. The body of these lights is only .47” thick. They each come with their own junction box and snap into the ceiling with spring clips. The lights are available in a variety of color temperatures. Some are even switchable between colors. I chose the 6” models which are 12W each in the 4000K color temperature.
When I told my electrician friend that we were going to install 46 of these lights in the basement, he thought I was crazy. And I have to admit, there were times when I would think about that number of lights and wonder if I was not thinking straight. But I explained to him that I didn’t want the room to look like a living room, but rather a museum. Additionally, we were putting most of the lights on dimmers, which would allow me to control the amount of light for different conditions. The one thing to keep in mind with these lights, is that they need to be installed not only at certain distances from each other, but also certain distances from walls. 2’ to 3’ is recommended to avoid large shadows on the wall. I decided to install the lights before the ceiling installation by temporarily supporting them from the floor joists with wire. This provided much needed work light during the rest of the construction. No more drop lights required. I highly recommend these lights.
Like I said, dimmers were installed to control most of the lights. There are a total of four dimmers controlling different areas. The lights under the soffit were not installed on a dimmer. They are either on or off. This works out well because if I want to just go across the basement to my workshop, I just turn on the soffit lights and it illuminates a walkway without lighting the whole basement. Here are some photos of different areas dimmed, and these are not turned all the way down either. If I remember correctly, they are dimmable down to 5%. Additional outlets were also installed in the room giving me a total of 14 outlets.
