I needed light in my shed and the only way I would be satisfied was if I had real lights, not those dim battery operated ones. Besides, I know having an outlet in the shed to plug things into would be very helpful. I already ran the wire to my door when I installed the outside light, so all I needed to do was get the power 12 feet away to my shed.

First I dug a 14″ deep trench between my basement door and shed (sorry, no pics of the trench :( the line in the sand shows where the trench was). Inside that trench I laid metal conduit with an outdoor 12/2 wire inside. Since I might build a summer house next spring, I figured I would take advantage of running the wire and add a CAT5 Ethernet cable along side the power cable. I’m not sure how the power cable will effect the data running on the CAT5 cable, but I had extra CAT5 cable laying around so I ran it anyway.

I used flexible conduit at the basement door and where the wire comes up from the trench into the shed.

After adding a junction box to the ceiling of the basement entrance (power in on the top, on the bottom one wire to outside light, one wire to shed), I added a junction box inside the shed where the wire comes in. I’m going to be adding an outlet later and having the junction box right there will make that a lot easier. I then ran power up to a switch and from the switch up to the florescent light. The switch will control two lights, but I’m only attaching one light for now. I ran the wire for the second light but just wrapped the end with electrical tape.

Once I attached and wired the florescent light to the ceiling joists of the shed, I turned on the breaker in my basement and flipped the switch in the shed.

This project, like the basement project, started in 2004 when I began digging out the dirt from my basement. I realized I had no place to store everything that was in the basement and the old 8′x6′ shed in my backyard was already full of stuff (and not very organized I might add), so I really had no where to store anything. Since I started purchasing investment properties and maintaining them myself, my collection of tools grew. I realized I needed a nice big area in which to organize and store everything. As usual, I looked into what I could build to fix that problem. Continue reading →