Hi, I'm Bob Vila.
Welcome to the show here in Melrose.
It's our final visit at the project where we've taken a basement area and turned it into a fabulous family room, and of course the project grew from there .
So we are going to show you other parts of the house where we have have made some serious improvements including the bedrooms, the backyard, we'll be looking at all sorts of lighting, lots of neat stuff to show you.
Stick around, it's good to have you with us.
Although Our project here began really just as an expansion and remodel of the downstairs basement space of this little house.
It soon expanded to include all sorts of areas that either needed repair or offered opportunities for improvement.
So I'm standing at the front of the house where we did some serious hardscape and landscape improvements.
Putting in a retainer wall to create a sense of separation from the sidewalk and the street, putting in all sorts of beautiful shrubs and bushes.
And then around the sides and the back of the house, a beautiful white cedar fence, including a potting shed and storage areas, so that the tiny backyard in the house can be further developed, where in fact we put in a beautiful area of pea stone and another area of new grass, something the little kids won't be able to destroy very easily.
And, now everything is complete, including the outdoor lighting.
What you do is you start with the right bulb size.
The bulb is, in this case, a 20 watt astro bright, has a 10,000 hour lamp life .
Similar to an LED light, it lasts a long time, but more user friendly than a halogen because if you touch this particular bulb with your fingers, it won't blow up as, as a halogen will because of the oil on your fingers.
That will then touch the light source and cause a problem.
From there you go to the stem and the fixture, which is a solid brass fixture made by Uniques.
Comes with a lifetime warranty, so you're guaranteed that it's gonna last forever and in any condition.
From there, you have got a great wire lead, cause the 25ft wire lead is pre-done, so you minimize the amount of connection which is your biggest breaking point in the lighting system.
With that, at the end of that wire lead, you take your 12-2 wire, in this case, and bring it to your main source, which then be your hub.
So, in this case, with this installation, as far as transformer power goe , we're going to be using 840 watt trans-meric from.
There's 22 light fixtures in this property.
Every fixture in this case is a twenty watt bulb, so we have more than enough transformer power to do this property.
What you could do, because we have a front yard, a backyard and a side yard, is you could designate the different sections and have different transformers, so you may want the front yard to stay on, maybe till twelve 'o' clock at night, maybe perhaps the backyard only goes on a switch so, then now you have options.
The style you are depending on the usage could then have it be on with the switch or have it be on a photocell timer, such as the front.
Photocell means that when it turns dark, it turns on.
A timer can turn it off whatever time you' ve predisposed it to do.
So what have we learned as far as insulation goes, no matter what the size of the project is, whether its a 10 light job or a 200 light project that you have to be able to go in order to make things work very consistently.
So as you dig your trenches and you lay your lights out.
What you want to do is when you pull your wire leads, which is our main line through the transmitter to our set of lights.
Three, four, five lights whatever a set it is.
You wanna pull it all the way to the end.
Pull your leads all the way back, that way, as far as is concerned with me owning a lighting company and being consistent, and having all our employees working at once, is as you start at the end and you finish, you can work your way back and everyone works their way back together.
So as you're wiring the lights it's putting the wire leads on it, hubbing them up, you start back filling, setting your lights and you all finish together right back at the transmitter where you then power up the lights and then you are done.
So in that sense everything's done perfectly together.
