Moving light fixture

greensalad

Possible silly question, but whenever I ask on here everyone gives me so many useful tips I wouldn’t have thought of so I love running things by you all!

 Currently having the upstairs of our house remodelled. New wall locations to create a dressing area. Plan to fit out with IKEA PAX wardrobes. 

We have now realised that the light fitting is going to be annoyingly close to the top of a wardrobe and ideally needs to be moved about a foot. 

No attic access as our upstairs is an attic conversion. Not sure on beam placement either, but a few pilot holes may give us the answer? 

We have plasterer booked on Thursday through our builder (who says he can’t do this electrical work as he’s only comfortable moving the basic light switch and socket). 

Was thinking about trying to get an electrician earlier this week and then (forgive me because I know nothing about this sort of thing) would the plasterer be able to patch over where the old rose would’ve been taken out? The ceiling wasn’t going to be plastered, just the new walls.

flashg67

I'd be tempted to look for a smaller light fitting if poss. With no access above, you'll likely end up with areas of your ceiling missing while you try to find the wiring, join a new piece then feed it to the new spot - though if there are no joists in the area you might be able to fish the wire through to the new spot if you're lucky. Carefully drilling a few exploratory holes won't do much damage I suppose
You may need to have a small piece of plaster board handy to patch any holes left by the old fitting but I wouldn't think your plasterer will mind filling small patch(es)

grumbler

A light fitting can be moved without  access from the top -  usually by making a series of small holes in the ceiling plasterboard. A little more difficult and more disruptive if you need to cross a joist.

Small holes in plasterboard, including the one from the old rose are pretty easy to patch, but there are ways of patching even biggish holes.

FaceHead

Moving it 'about a foot' should be anything between easy peasy and ok. More than likely you won't need to cross over a joist - either you're travelling in line with the joists or, given that the spacing is probably 2 or 2 and a half feet, you might not even come across the next one.

The absolute worst case is use a stanley knife/multitool to take down a 12" x 4" strip of ceiling, which your plasterer can patch, skim over and you sand the edges to make it decent.

Make something like 50mm hole where you want the new light, and fish a fresh 1mm wire from the old hole to the new one. Ideally you can just feed the wire through, probably opening the old hole out to a rough 60mm square or so, so you can get you fingers through and, later pass a junction box up. If you have to do a bit more damage to the ceiling to make a hole in the joist, so be it. 

Now you'll need a suitable maintenance free junction box (I like the hager j804) to wire up the probably 4 wires you have at the old light location, and toss all that up into the ceiling void.

Plasterer patches the old hole. He can leave the new one that'll be covered by the new light.

greensalad

flashg67 said:

I'd be tempted to look for a smaller light fitting if poss. With no access above, you'll likely end up with areas of your ceiling missing while you try to find the wiring, join a new piece then feed it to the new spot - though if there are no joists in the area you might be able to fish the wire through to the new spot if you're lucky. Carefully drilling a few exploratory holes won't do much damage I suppose
You may need to have a small piece of plaster board handy to patch any holes left by the old fitting but I wouldn't think your plasterer will mind filling small patch(es)

The light fitting that is there is already small. The issue is that it stops us being able to frame in the wardrobes which we desired to do. It's liveable, but it's just going to be one of those things that will always annoy me, so figured might as well try and rectify while I've already got a plasterer coming, no carpets in, and all that. 

Do joists tend to run parallel floor and ceiling? Having had the carpet up I've been DIYing fixing a creaky floor by following the joists based on the nails and adding additional screws, so if they follow the same way then I can already tell there will be no joist, just void from the current light position to the new desired location.

scottishblondie

We moved our kitchen island light fitting rose over about 50cm a few months ago.  The joists ran in the correct direction so we were able to fish the cables across easily - we just cut a hole in the new location and used a piece of wire to tape the cables on to and pull them across to the new location.  Used filler in the old hole, sanded it down and painted.