Yard Sale and opportunistic wiring

 "We are members of one great body, planted by nature.  We must consider that we were born for the good of the whole." - Lucius Annaeus Seneca

This is the weekend of the annual church yard sale.  Since joining this church, our family normally donates time and goods to the cause.  It's a huge project, because over the course of a year, members and public donors fill up the garage of the church with donated goods.  Then over the course of a day, all of those goods are removed and set up under canopies for display and sale.  Quite the moving project.

We have missed the yard sale for the past two years.  In 2020 it was cancelled because the church didn't want to be involved in a Covid-spreading event within the community.  In 2021 the church yard sale was held as usual, but work had a stranglehold on my time.  I don't recall last summer if I had to work, or was simply too exhausted to feel like moving huge quantities of stuff around on a rare day off.

In any event, we are back this year.  The wife and I are splitting up our time so that the husky doesn't have to be stuck in her crate for the entire weekend.  We don't trust her not to tear up the house if left out.  I'm not sure she would destroy the furniture, but I'm not sure she wouldn't, either...

At church yesterday, we hauled several vintage microwave ovens, a couple of old-fashioned picture-tube television sets and a dead refrigerator to the county waste disposal site.  Fortunately the grumpy employee who gave me so much grief when I was getting rid of the tires wasn't there this time. 

One of the things that I've been wanting to do during the yard sale is re-lamp the garage in which this donated stuff is stored all year long.  I've long wanted to replace the old fixtures with modern LED fixtures.  Most of the year though, it's impossible to walk to the back of the garage, let alone set up a ladder to replace the light fixtures.

This year, I seized on the opportunity to install some fixtures that I had purchased long ago.  Finally we are able to attend, and since the stuff is currently out of the way for the task, now is the time.   There were initially three dual 4ft fluorescent fixtures installed down the center of the garage, of which only two actually worked.

 Below:  The two old working fluorescent fixtures in the church garage, before I got going.

Below:  One LED lamp installed.  Note the difference in brightness, looking directly at each lamp.  The LED fixtures have a bit more glare when you look directly at them.   The bulbs in the fluorescent fixtures are pretty shot.  New bulbs would improve the situation, but that technology needs to be over.

Below:  After a couple of hours of work.  I had to salvage the power cords from the old lamps to use on the new ones, since everything was already set up to plug these fixtures into outlets.  

I have a couple more LED fixtures, but I've run out of 120V outlets in the rafters.  I'll probably pick up another outlet box and install that, then put new LED lamps up in the center again as well.

We will see what the next couple of days bring.  Hopefully I can add two more fixtures without incident.  The task seemed to be very hard on my neck due to looking sharply upwards.

UPDATE 16 July 22:

I added another outlet and the last two fixtures.  It made quite a bit of difference in the area lighting situation, so that was good.  It took quite a bit of time, as I'm not a real residential electrician.  I only pretend to be one on TV.

Below: The right hand outlet I installed and connected up to the one on the left.   Yeah, the wiring looks pretty chickenshit.  The garage was a sweat-box and I was already pretty tired from work and humping stuff.  It didn't trip the breaker or start a fire, so I'm OK with it.

Below:  The center two fixtures that I installed this morning.  It would have been easier if it wasn't necessary to move furniture around whenever I needed to relocate the ladder!