When we moved into our new house the garage was clean, but very dark. The garage is a three-car garage that is small (in my opinion). The space is 21′ deep by 31’6″ wide. There is a double door (16′ wide) and a single door side (8′ wide) with a small storage extension on the one side of the garage.

There were only two cheap single bulb fixtures lighting up the garage area. One over the double car side and one over the single car side. It was difficult to see at nighttime and the lights were honestly basically worthless. As I started laying things out in the garage it became clear the garage was an area that was skimped on from an electrical standpoint. All total (excluding garage door openers) there was literally 1 electrical outlet – one, uno, eins…this wasn’t going to work for me.

After I measured things out, I started to put together an initial layout of where I would want to add the lighting and any additional electrical outlets in the garage. I figured if we were going to have an electrician come out I would have them do as many things on our wish list as possible.

The initial layout looked like what you see below. I was planning on adding six LED fixtures in the garage and five additional outlets – three along the workbench wall, one along the side wall and one in the ceiling in the front corner. The outlet on the far left hand side is for the existing irrigation controller. This will get installed into a cabinet down the road. The middle outlet is for the workbench itself and the far right hand outlet is for a future TV. The outlet on the right hand wall is for a refrigerator/freezer that we have on order and the one in the ceiling is for a future garage heater.

In addition to the new outlets I came across some cool extension cord reels that I installed on the ceiling next to the garage door openers. These things have been amazing. No more dragging out an extension cord every time we need to power something up, no more struggling to wind up cords or drag them out into the driveway. Just grab the end of the cord from the ceiling and pull out the length you need. When you’re done pull down again and it automatically retracts back up into the reel. These specific reels were purchased at Harbor Freight, but you can find similar items at Amazon.

Below you can see some pictures from when there were only two single light bulb fixtures out in the garage. These had 3000k bulbs installed, which helped, but as you can see it’s still pretty dark in there.

I did a LOT of research on lighting. A lot…more than I would care to actually add up. There are a lot of options on the market – high bay fixtures, flush mount fixtures, recessed cans, different color temperatures, light output levels, etc. At the end of the day I wanted something that would be bright (but not blind us), relatively color accurate, attractive and have flexibiity with the installation. We ended up going with this 4ft LED fixture from Antflux.

The fixture is a good mix. It is cost effective, has low power consumption, a good appearance and could be linked together form longer chains of lights. The other thing I liked about this fixture is that it doesn’t have the cheap plastic covers that you see on some other light fixtures. This fixture, once installed, isn’t going to come off the wall and you don’t have to worry about the plastic shroud falling off. It is integrated into the fixture.

These are a good balance as well. At 5500 lumens they put out a lot of light, but not so much that you will get headaches when working in the garage. They are also 4000k for the color temperature which is basically bright white (not daylight). Again keeping the intensity down while making things bright and relatively color accurate.

The electrician had the lights up relatively quickly and ended up running a small piece of conduit between the fixtures on the right hand side of the garage due to limited access from above. The lights turned out great. They are instant on and add a ton of light to the space.

Things are definitely a lot brighter and getting more functional!! We are continuing to work on adding other storage solutions to the garage to get it full completed and organized. It may be a few more months until we get the cabinets in and replaced, but once they do you will be the first to know about it!

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