After a whole year without any real progress in the basement, I finally got back on track. Using Kaylee as bait, I got my parents to visit for the weekend so my dad could help me with the electrical wiring.
Luckily for me, my dad is an old pro at this kind of thing. He even recently helped my brother with his basement wiring. He had built a nifty spool reel for the 1000 ft spool of 14-2 Romex that I picked up for the project (Pictured to the left).
Knowing that we only had two day full days to work, I decided to start with the recessed lights. I have quite a large rec-room divided into two parts. All total, I wanted 15 recessed lights. Normally you wouldn't actually hook up the fixtures until after the walls and ceiling were done, but I wanted the extra light while working on the rest of the basement.
The first thing we did was create a grid on the ceiling with string to see exactly where each light would go. The important thing to remember here was to space the lights 4 feet apart so that the would fit nicely in the center of the drop ceiling tiles later on.
Next, we hung up all of the fixtures. We used drywall screws instead of the nails included with the lights. This way I can easily remove them later on when I need to set the lights down into the drop ceiling track.
Then we drilled all of the holes needed to run the cable. Running the cable itself turned out to be particularly easy with two people and the reel of Romex.
The majority of the time was then spent wiring in each fixture, as well as the switches.
The above picture shows the "Home Theater" portion of the rec room. Since most dimmer switches are only rated for 600 watts, and I had 6 lights on one switch, I decided to get a high-end 1000 watt switch. It was expensive but it should help against the "buzzing" that can occur if a switch is being pushed to it's limits.
The larger section of the rec room had 9 lights. I divided this up into two groups. The first group of lights contained the four corners and the center light. The second group contained the remaining four lights.
The picture to the left shows the larger section with all 9 lights on. All told it took the two of us two solid days for all 15 lights.
