Installing pot lights pt 1

hello YouTube today we are going to be putting in pot lights and I'm gonna make this video hopefully to help you guys put in some pot lights in your house I recently needed to put some pot lights in my house I got a quote from a contractor and you're looking at almost $200 of pot light or about 150 bucks a pot light if you provide your own pot lights that is way out of my league so I learned myself and I'm gonna share with you what I've learned the first thing we're gonna go over is the tools you're gonna need for the project and I found that basically the most prohibitive thing was getting some of these tools once I had these tools and once I spent good money on these tools the job wants so much easier so let's go over what you're gonna need the first thing you're gonna need is a fish a wire fishing thingy majiggy to get your wire through the ceiling you could purchase one or what I've been using is are these coat hangers from the dry cleaner I'll make a little hook and there you go I've got a little wire fishy thingamajiggy I also use this little guy these little finger traps you put your wires in there and it squeezes your wire then you hook that to the end of your handy dandy wire fishing thingy majiggy and you pull that through the ceiling the next thing you're gonna need one of these flexible drill bits these things are crazy expensive but you need them you need it well you may need it I'll explain that later but just to demonstrate what this thing does look at this like this these things Bend and they're great through they're great for drilling through your joists to pull wire obviously a drill you're going to need a I use a little 3/4 inch hole bit and the reason I need this is because what you're gonna do is you're gonna drill little holes into your ceiling in order to look inside your ceiling and I'll explain that in a bit also now you're going to need holes to put into your ceiling to get the pot lights up there so you can get these hole saws or you know you just find the size that you need as per the instructions of your pot lights or if as in my situation I couldn't find the right size I had to purchase one of these adjustable hole saws you see that you basically spread these two little Forks apart these little knives you drill up and boom makes a hole in your ceiling and it's cool because it comes with a nifty little dust shield which works a bit I mean it's not amazing but it works pretty good obviously tape measure little utility knife a good old-fashioned pen seal you're gonna need your roll of cable your wire snips a Phillips head screwdriver a flathead screwdriver and a little circuit tester picks up the static just the you need this to basically make it safer find live wires and such you're obviously going to need a pot light whatever you purchase read the instructions because remember I was telling you that you're gonna need to drill holes into your ceiling so the instructions are gonna tell you exactly what size of hole to drill if you drill a hole that is too small not a big deal you can make it bigger if you drill a hole that's too big you sort of screwed yourself and now you're gonna have to do some patching and that sucks a lot so for these lights I had to set this guy at 3 and 3/8 inch you know what I mean so you could sort of see that goes anyway that's what I mean you're also going to need like the little twist eyes that come with the light and you're gonna need one of these little I don't even know what they call them just ask at your local big store basically what these are when you pull the wiring through this when you pop these off the edges are sharp so you have to basically put one of these in in order to have a smooth edge and you can clamp your wires and and it's you know safer it won't cut your wires the number one thing that I ended up using and you're going to need to either buy one or rent one are these endoscopic cameras these things are a must there's other videos on YouTube that show how to put in pot lights but they don't address the dangers of just drilling and blind so ultimately you may have to drill through your joists and in this video I'm going to show you how to do that I'm also going to show you how to do it another way just because I'm fortunate in my house I'll explain that later but anyway if you drill through joists you can't do a blind you have to poke a hole in between each one of your joists in the ceiling remember I told you that you're gonna need one of these little hole bits and what you're going to need to do is drill a hole through your drywall through your ceiling into the joist in order to get this camera in so that you could see if there's any wires or any any anything really plumbing gas lines that are in the wall or in the ceiling because the last thing you'd need or the last thing you'd want to do is take this drill bit here and start drilling blind and Pierce a water line or pierce an electric cable or a gas line you're in for a world of hurt so these things you need it you need it do not ever drill into your walls or ceilings blind you never know what you're gonna do or what you're gonna hit and these things are great unfortunately I only have two hands but you know if you turn this baby on you know it shows you basically let me flip you can flip the image you could basically you know what I mean you could look around and you could put the and it stretches out about two and a half feet and it's flexible you know you could put it into your ceiling and you could inspect what's underneath the drywall you need one of these you need them unless you're extremely confident and you had hand in building your house and you know exactly where there are cables or there aren't cables or gas lines or water lines this thing is gonna save your life one more thing I forgot to mention you're obviously going to need a stud finder why to find studs obviously okay so now we're gonna take our stud finder and our pen seal and we're gonna go look at our ceiling so this is the ceiling where I'm going to be installing pot lights this is in my basement it's a work in progress so don't look at that mess there Jesus anyway don't make fun but we're planning on having a little entertainment room down here so this ceiling is where we want to put in our pot lights pretty simple I guess you may have a similar situation in a dining room TV room hallway it's all gonna work the same what we need to do is take our handy dandy stud finder and our pen seal and we're going out to find studs and I've already done that here and as you can see there is a stud I marked them there is a stud there is a stud there is a stud there is a stud there is a stud I'm not gonna show you how to use a stud finder because oh heck let's let's show people how to use a stud finder so you put the stud finder on the ceiling you press the button that turns it on there it is and read your stud finders instructions and you pull it across a lot not good put it against there you go turn it on and you pull it across gently goddamn it this is a pretty crappy stud finder the batteries in it are dead or dying sorry I'm doing this with my weekend there say look it's a stud right where I marked it so you're gonna need to find all your studs use your pen seal to mark them and the next thing you're gonna need to do is plan out where you're gonna put your pot lights so in this situation I'm going to put nine right here in this area I'm just gonna sort of spread them out we're going to put one two three four five six seven eight nine so what I'm going to do is I'm going to make my little plan as to where I'm gonna put my my pot lights and for that obviously I'm gonna need my pen seal and my tape measure and once I get that done I'll show you case oh I've I've measured out where I'm gonna put my pot lights and this is just a little diagram that I drew out now obviously yours is gonna be different because you have different room but it just goes to show you that you should take the time to plan out how you're gonna put this so that at the end it looks great so basically you know they're gonna be 22 inches everything is in inches here 22 inches from the outside walls they're gonna be 24 inches from the front and the back of the room this way so this pot light is gonna be 39 inches from the center pot light which is gonna be 39 inches from the last pot light same hearing here 39 inches apart and going this way the lengthwise of the room this pot lights gonna be 55 inches from this pot light was gonna be 55 inches from this pot light and so on and so forth so I planned it out I measured it on my ceiling so now I have a good idea of where everything's gonna go and it's gonna look neat and good I'll show you on the ceiling what I did so here you go so they're marked where it's going to go so this is 24 inches from the front and twenty two inches from the side now this is important because see we have our studs marked out you're gonna have to figure out like if you you can't put one here obviously because there's a stud you see what I mean you're gonna have to put it in between the studs so they're marked out another one which is 24 and oh sorry yeah what do we what do we say it was 22 inches from the side and here's another one 22 inches 22 inches from there and 24 from the back and again I marked my studs out on this side as well there's going to be a stud so this seats not going to interfere and then from there so let's take the front ones so from there we move along this is where the next one's going to be we measured it out so 20 24 in and this is we know our stud is here so this is not going to interfere and the same thing here there's where pilot is gonna go right here you see that's where the stud is and again it's not gonna interfere we wouldn't be able to put this pot light here because the stud is there okay awesome so then the next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna set up our hole saw I'm gonna use the adjustable one right here and I need to get this these tongs or these knives have to be three and three eighths apart see that so basically I've pre-measured this I've already done a few holes upstairs in my house so you see how the knives are three and three-eighths apart it's very very important to do that set that up accurately make sure that this knife is this focus this knife is the same distance from here as this knife is the the the you know I mean it just has to be centered otherwise you're gonna screw yourself you put this through the little dust shield like yay put that into your drill and tighten it and there we go we have a little knife and let's make our first hole now you just have to forgive me because I have only more two hands so there it is so we're gonna have to line up and the good thing about these dust shields is you could see through them so I'm going to line it up directly on the point you see that you can see through it give it a little there it is and now we're just gonna drill into the ceiling and make a hole there's our hole beautiful hole and you can see that the dust shield caught most of the dust it's not perfect but it's a pretty good system so I have gone ahead and I have cut out all the holes in my ceiling using that adjustable drill bit I showed you get showed you guys there's a nice hole beautiful hole yes nice and even beautifully even Wow look at that everything was pre measured right measure twice cut once is what they say now here I'm gonna have a little trouble and so I so the floor joists or yeah I guess the floor joists of the floor above there are these bracing pieces and I didn't pick this up on my stud detector so I'm gonna have to deal with that you see I can't put my light in because there's this little thing here now this just basically stabilizes the floor joists that's what I'm gonna have to do where is it where is it where is my thingy majiggy oh there it is I'm gonna have to take my chisel and a hammer and I'm gonna have to basically just chisel this guy out or maybe just even remove them like if I remove one it's not gonna be there you go fine chills it out see or remove it it won't won't compromise the floor above it's just the one and it's it moves now so I don't I don't even know if I'll need a chisel I may be able just to pull it out I'll work on that anyway but you may come into problems like that or don't don't fret my pet you could deal with it there's another nice hole there's another nice hole and here we have a problem here I didn't measure correctly I drilled this first and then I took a look and as you could see this one here that I drilled does not align with the other ones sir I have to drill the second hole and now this is still gonna be okay for me to put my light in but now I'm gonna have to patch this and patching sucks so I think right now we have to show my wife and she's not gonna be happy okay so I showed my wife she was pretty cool pretty cool yeah it'll be fixed don't worry so anyway I have this piece here that I actually cut up from here you see how this was the original hole so what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna patch it I was gonna patch it like be a little simple drywall patching people everything bi re I'll do that and then we'll come back there it's done easy drywall fix I mean once we get the pot light up here I'll uh you know put some fresh mud on this you won't even see it but I put a shim would have like a shim from here here I found some that there and there and then put that piece back we're good

Channel: Peter Izdebski

Views: 35,217

Keywords: YouTube Editor, pot lights, electrical, recessed lighting, potlights, ceiling, wiring, diy

Id: _eDTaXf29rg

Length: 17min 31sec (1051 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 17 2017