Wow, a huge upgrade! BTW, what's with the wall of 2X4s and hardware cloth?

It was a little closed off area for some kittens they had. Now it's just a storage "room" for my grandpa's toy car stuff. You can see I added a blank cover where the old pullchain was. We bought it because I thought there was a box behind there but turns out it was just screwed into a piece of wood and was wired with K&T. I installed the box cover anyway lol. It really doesn't make a difference though since there's already a ton of sheetrock ripped out of the ceiling lol.

Time to install a suspended ceiling down there to match the troffers!

Way too short of a ceiling to do that, since this would otherwise be a perfect candidate for a suspended ceiling for sure. The ceiling is only like 6ft tall as it is lol. I'm 5ft 4.5in so the suspended ceiling would still be OK for me but the average joe would have to duck if we put a suspended ceiling up.

Oh, now I see.

Nothing better than having access when a place is doing a lighting upgrade! Back in '86, at 17, I had a summer job as 'custodian' at my high school. One of the regular custodians told me of a school lighting upgrade in the next town....so I went there and scored ridiculous amount of lighting fixtures, ballasts, etc. lol. After that, all of my friends and family had free lighting to add to their garages, basements, etc.

Well I didn't really have "access" so much as I had a friend sneak by there at night with his pick-up and load it up with finds from the dumpster lol. This kid could rob a cop car in a fluorescent vest in broad daylight and he wouldn't get caught. If I so much as think about "rescuing" the cops probably already have a cruiser on its way to check it out.

I helped him with his senior portfolio as payment.

The best part is that these are already T8, so I don't have to worry about someone doing a lighting upgrade again (though certainly LEDs might come along at some point, but not while my grandparents own the place).

Yeah, "access" isn't really the right word. It was more like "informed" since I wouldn't have known about it. I drove my mom's '75 Impala up to the school dumpster in the early evening, nobody around, and just started plucking away. Huge pile...tandem 40w and 4x40w louvered mostly, and tons of 40w lamps. Nobody stopped to ask what I was up to either.

Wow they even tossed the lamps in there too? They removed all the lamps from these fixtures. They had two giant tan ~50yd dumpsters full of lights. They also had a bunch of wraps, which were original to the building (1970) but he only got me these troffers, which I think were from the late 90s but dunno. The Advance ballasts in them are really cool. Dimmable three lamp programmed start ballast. Ever seen these before?

I got a bunch of F40s free from my school a few years ago, with permission, but still brought them home one or two at a time (all I could do, walking back and forth) for a couple months. I also kinda "snuck out the back door" since I figured otherwise people would think something was weird... even though it was totally legit.