Wayne and Erika Pfeiler

Since we bought the house in Fall 2004, I've been talking about installing recessed lighting in our living room downstairs. Finally, on Sunday I decided the time had come, and we took a trip to Home Depot and bought four straight down lights and four eyeball lights, 100 feet of Romex electrical line, some wiring nuts, and eight light bulbs. It's annoying, the light fixture kits only cost a dollar or two more than the light bulbs do. Hopefully both will last a long time.

With all the supplies in hand, we planned where to install the lights and cut the first hole in the ceiling. Then I realized a problem. The space between the ceiling was different than what I was used to in my parent's house in Tennessee. In their house, the upstairs floor was supported by a 2x6, and then there was a gap below, followed by a 2x4 supporting the ceiling. In our house, there was only one huge 2x10 that supported both the floor and ceiling. This meant I couldn't just pass the wiring through a gap that I'd imagined should be there. That brought work to a halt for the night, as I planned what else to do.

I had several ideas, some better than others. I thought we could pull up the carpet and flooring up stairs, and access the space to drill holes through the joists to run the wiring. That would require a lot of work. I thought we might be able to pass the wires through the ceiling box between the living and dining rooms, but that didn't work out either. Then I read a nice page about installing speaker wire into a house, and they showed tips on how to work around joists in the walls or ceiling. This usually involved sawing a small hole in the sheetrock, notching the joist, running the wire, then repairing the hole. It sounded like my best option. Then I had a realization. We have crown molding all around the ceilings downstairs. I could remove that, and cut a narrow hole in the sheetrock that would be covered by the crown molding, repair the hole, then replace the crown molding. This way, people would never even see the evidence of a hole.

So over the course of the next few days, I carefully removed the crown molding and made those holes. Then I ran the wiring to a twin set of light switches already there. One switch turned a receptacle on and off, and the other did nothing. That always confused me. Why install a switch if it doesn't do anything:? But anyway, this worked out great for the way I planned to control the lights. I ended up using all 100 feet of the wire, so my estimate was spot-on. I wired the lights and tested them out before clamping them into the ceiling. Everything worked. I was so excited that I woke up Erika (past her bedtime) to come see everything working. She gave a sleepy smlie and seemed happy with everything.

So now we have new lights in the room, and we're able to move the floor lamps somewhere else. I'm also happy with the way everything works. The grou outside corner eyeball lights are controlled by one switch, and the four inside straight-down lights would be controlled by the other switch. When we want lots of light in the room, we turn everything on. The inside four lights give plenty of light for reading papers or working on things in the room. The outside four eyeball lights are turned away from the center of the room, so they work to accent the bookcases and fireplace. They're also great for when we're watching tv after dark, and we don't want light glaring in our eyes or the tv screen. Hooray!