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Summary: Plan your runs, avoid half-puck cuts, and leave clean transitions at corners and peaks.

Installation Order Matters

Before getting into the mechanics of drilling and cutting, it’s worth talking about where I started and why.

Start Somewhere Easy (On Purpose)

The very first base tracks I installed were in a spot that checked two important boxes:

• ✅ Easy to access
• ✅ Included almost every tricky feature I’d face later

For me, that spot was my back porch. It gave me:

• Flat, full-length runs above a door
• Several short direction changes where the house bumps out for a window
• A soffit pass-through to transition into a gable
• A full gable run that goes up and over the peak

Where I installed my first tracks

Almost all of this was reachable from a basic step ladder, with only the very top of the gable needing a simple 8-foot ladder. That made it an ideal place to learn and practice on.

There’s more to learn in these initial track installs than you’d think. Doing the base track and puck tracks in this area allowed me to:

• Figure out which tools I need to install the base track, how I want to hold things, my order of operations, and much more. Trying to figure that out when you’re 20’ up a ladder and need to come down constantly isn’t fun to me.
• Dial in my screw tension
• Practice cutting and labeling custom pieces for transitions (more on that later)
• Learn how to route lights and wires around orientation changes and through soffits
  • Even more important: figuring out what problems I would face when drilling large holes through my soffits to run cabling. I had no experience with that before.
  • Equally important: practice patching and painting big 1" holes in the soffit when I did things wrong 😅
• Figure out the best crimping techniques for custom-length strings
• Get a nice run of about 8 total strings and get a better idea of how they’re going to look when done! That’s always super motivating.

Do the Weird and Hard Parts Early

In the Planning & Design section I mentioned identifying areas that are either difficult to reach, structurally weird, or visually unforgiving.

After getting a little hands-on practice in the easy area, I started tackling the difficult to reach and unique areas. I saved visually unforgiving (the front of the house mostly) for last so that I had gained all the experience I could before getting there.

That’s a personal preference, but it’s how I like to tackle projects.

Knocking out the tricky bits early meant I wasn’t spending the rest of the install dreading them. Everything after that felt like repetition instead of risk.

The Big Takeaway

Don’t start on longest or most visible runs just because they’re “first” on the house or because they’re a quick way to get a lot done.

Start where you can make mistakes safely, learn the system, and build confidence.

Your future self will appreciate it.

Initial Install Strategy

I had basically all of the base tracks installed around the whole house by the time I started installing the actual lights (aside from the test ones). I also had my control box functional enough to test the lights as I hung them (when possible at least; I didn’t simply hang them from beginning to end so I often used my temporary controller and PSU for testing).

Even though doing it this way meant going around the house with the ladder more than once, I strongly preferred installing almost all base tracks and then installing all lights.

Doing it in two passes meant:

• Fewer tool changes
• Less mental context switching
• A smoother workflow overall