Let there be Light

I promise you I am working on the lighting but it is quite a slow job and family and life keeps stealing my playtime.  I don't want to do the reveal article until the job is finished.  I wondered if you might want to read a couple of pieces I wrote for Dolls House and Miniature Scene magazine about lighting.

This first one is my first attempt on my very first project and uses the white plastic power strips that many people use.

Let there be light .....

And God said, 'Let there be light' and there was light, but the Electricity Board said He would have to wait until Thursday to be connected.
Spike Milligan

These articles are in no way being offered as instructions on how to do things.  They are the ramblings of someone who came to dollhousing without a clue about any craft-type hobby or anything very practical beyond cooking, gardening and sewing.  Happily all the new skills I acquired when I was making my Wentworth Court project seemed to fit like a glove and things turned out fine.

Then there are the electrics!  Ironically it seems to be my bête noire.  I confess it still has me beaten in all sorts of ways.

If you are considering lighting your house the first big decision is whether to go the copper wiring route or in the plug and play direction.  I am sure this is just a totally personal choice and I can’t see how one is better or worse than the other.  They each have drawbacks and pluses.  I chose the socket and plug route as these looked something like the normal lights and wires and plugs we use every day.

It is easy to understand how it goes together.  Each light or fire has a wire with a plug attached; this will plug into a power strip 

which, in turn, is attached to a transformer. 

Like much in life, understanding it and doing it are two very different things. 

As I said this isn’t a how-to-do-it article and there are tons of great ‘how-to’s’ if you need them just by googling ‘dolls house electrics’.  I just want to share my findings with you and maybe warn you about the problems you might encounter and some things you may want to find out more about before you tackle the job.

When you set off to buy your electrical bits and bobs you will need to know in advance how many plugs (i.e. lights, fires etc) your house will end up with as this determines the size of the power strip needed.  You also need to know how many actual bulbs you will have – no, this won’t be the same number as plugs; for example a chandelier is one plug but several bulbs.  The bulb count is to work out what size transformer you will need.  I reckon this is nigh on impossible to assess in advance when tackling your first project.  Most of us don’t design the interiors to within an inch of our lives before we start.  At best we have a vague idea and chop and change and fiddle around with it as we go.  All I can say is, if you are in any doubt, buy more than you think you’ll need.

Considering that my Wentworth Court began as Jane Austen’s house and ended up as a modern family home you can immediately see the difference in the electricity needed to service it.  I bought a power strip which soon ran out of socket holes.  This worked out fine because my house is very tall being over four floors and it meant I could have two power strips.  This allowed most of the various wires to reach one or other of them without having to be extended.  So this is an ‘accident’ you might want to consider having.

Again the god’s were smiling on me. I greatly underestimated the bulb count and would have ended up with too small a transformer.  This wouldn’t be good as they aren’t particularly cheap to get wrong and have to discard.  As it turned out I couldn’t get the size I wanted from the show I went to and, because I am dreadful at waiting for stuff, I just bought a large one which turned out to be just the ticket. 

Deciding on the order in which you do things when dollhousing often has difficult choices attached.   When do the fireplaces go in?  The fireplaces in my dolls house were going to be sitting on the finished floors rather than being installed before they went in.  I decided I didn’t want to have to cut the sheets of wooden flooring to fit around them.  All sorts of things come into play here, including what era are the fireplaces?  Each period will need different things.  What sort of hearth do they have, for example?  Different rooms would have had very different fireplaces and hearths.  For me, very new to this work, I wanted the simplest route so once the painting and wallpapering were done and the floors were put in I decided to add the fireplaces. In the Wentworth the fires go on the side walls because this is where the chimneys are located. 

The easiest way to wire them is to drill a hole immediately behind the fireplace and take the wire straight out to the power socket.  I didn’t want wires all over the sides of the house so I drilled holes in the back corners and ran the wires along the join between the floor and wall and out through the hole.  The wires were eventually concealed by the skirting board.

I can see all sorts of potential problems doing this and maybe cutting a groove to meet the usual pre-cut groove in the centre of the floor would be the best way to go.  I am sure if a light or fire had to be removed (heaven forbid!) it would be easier to remove the floor to get it out than remove a skirting board to liberate it.  I also couldn’t solve the problem of the wire making the fire stand away from the wall slightly.  I tried scratching grooves in wood and resin to bed it in but without success.

Having mentioned cutting grooves it reminds me how much of a problem for me that turned out to be.  Most people when talking about wiring a dolls house just casually say something like – ‘’cut a groove’’.  Yes, well, like how?  Lots more web trawling followed.  So far I have come up with advice such as buying a fantastic piece of kit like the Dremel (and other mini routers) which many of us (a) can’t afford or (b) don’t want to buy for a handful of jobs. Then there are suggestions like using a small, fine, sharp, v-shaped chisel, please refer back to (a) and (b) and add (c) as they are as rare as hen’s teeth to find.  I have just bought a tile grout remover for £1.53, which is something else someone recommended.  I haven’t tried it yet, so I can’t comment.  All I can say about cutting grooves is that if, like me, you try to do it with a craft knife and steel ruler (another piece of web advice) and/or a v-shaped file you may as well give up now.  To be fair it must be doable, so have a bash, but I never succeeded in making any half way decent straight groove, with the right depth, to neatly carry wires across a floor or roof.  Hack away at it as best you can is my only advice.

  

OK, so now I have the fires in.  Luckily with the Wentworth it came with grooves for the lights and I didn’t have to make any additional ones.

There is one thing though before putting the lights in place; you will need to consider if any of the wires or chains that some of the central lights are hanging on need lengthening or shortening.  I didn’t do this with my chandeliers and blithely installed the first one and then discovered that you would have to be considerably vertically challenged to walk under it.  It was about four inches above the floor.  It couldn’t really be used successfully in the room I had.  To get it above head height the candles would be virtually touching the ceiling.  I know in this house the chandeliers are supposed to be modern and electric but they would still look pretty silly.  I found a compromise with a coffee table and put it in the room so no-one would need to walk underneath the light. 

The dining room presented less of a problem as the light was bought to go over the dining table.  I pretty much had to adjust all the ceiling lights which went in this house. 

Occasionally, and especially if you buy second-hand lights, the wires are too short to reach the power strip.  Doing the Wentworth I just bought half a dozen extension cords, so the short wire plugged into that and they then plugged into the power strip.  I have since learned to join wires but unless the junction is going to be a problem, under flooring for example, the simple method of using extension cords works perfectly well.

With those decisions made and lengths adjusted you can now go on to thread the wires through the teeny (nigh on invisible) holes in the ceilings.  To do this you begin by removing the plug.  None of the unscrewing backs of plugs and pins inside like in 1/1 world, you just pull out the pins and then pull out the wire.   I find I am grinning as I am typing this. Pull out the pins begins with fingers and thumbs, progresses to teeth and ultimately – the tool for the job – needle nose pliers.  If you buy nothing else – buy these – your fingers, thumbs and teeth will thank you!  You then tug the wires up out of the holes and back through the plug.  Meanwhile you have put the teeny pins down somewhere and they have rolled or you have become pin blind because you can’t find them anywhere.  The next handy tip is:  before you start, find something small but heavy to put your pins in.

Having removed the sticky pad waxy paper cover all we have to do is thread the wire through the ceiling hole, pull the light up gently, centre it over the hole and press firmly in place.  I bet if you haven’t done this yet you haven’t a clue how frustrating this little task can be.

After doing many, many of them I eventually figured out that trying to wiggle two waggling wires through a small hole is just plain daft.  If you have enough length on the wire to be able to cut off the split ends – do so.  You then have a neat, stiffer piece of wire to poke through.  I also sometimes push a biggish needle downwards through the hole so it marks the exact position for me.  Sounds daft but most times you can’t really see the hole properly.  It is quite dark in those small room spaces and you have to be a bit of a contortionist as you attack each floor trying to see where it is.  As always you only have two hands where you need three.

With the wires now threaded through you can pull gently on them until the sticky pads are in place.  This is another thing I would like to change but I don’t know how.  In the Wentworth all my lights went in using the sticky pads which were attached to them.  Not only do I not like the look of them but, sometimes, they made the wires sort of lopsided.  The wires are coming from the centre of the light but then they have to travel across the pad to the side edge and then through the ceiling hole, so you aren’t strictly centring the light over the hole.  Unless you have micrometer eyeballs that in itself doesn’t matter but the wires do make a slight lump so things can look a bit skewed.  I confess that I am probably being excessively fussy here and really they are fine. 

The real issue I have with the sticky pads is that while they might be pads they aren’t all that sticky.  Many of mine don’t seem to stick.  Often when I open my house my first job is to re-stick the kitchen, the girl’s bedroom wall and the sitting room wall lights.  Annoyed by this I have tried adding all sorts of glue to the pads without success.  On my current (second) project I have peeled off these pads before putting the lights in place, but I am struggling with finding a glue that works well, so I am not promoting that as the path to take (yet).

The other thing which often needs a tweak when opening the house is the odd light bulb here and there which, presumably has a bit of a loose connection and doesn’t light up without it being pressed, pushed, twisted or flicked.  This is another issue I haven’t resolved as yet although the numbers were reduced when I went round screwing them all in properly with this handy little gadget.  Again, this is an essential tool for changing any bulbs further down the line and can be bought cheaply if you keep your eyes open for it.

It is double-ended; one end is soft and the other is metal with splits.  It is just a matter of trying which end does the best for the bulb shape/size and the job you want doing.  It is also made to work in tight spaces as it is small.

Just when you thought I’d said all there was to say about plugs.... not so, because now that the wires for the lights and fires are all threaded through to the back and the power strip is stuck in place you will need to re-attach the plugs.  This is where my tears and tantrums really start.  In all seriousness this is the only task I have done in all this dollhousing stuff that I positively hate and would hire someone to do if it were possible.  Part of my frustration is that I can’t understand why I find it so difficult. I can make a box and a lid small enough for a single tablet of soap easily and with pleasure.  Then hand me a dolls house plug, wires and pins and I lose the use of an opposing thumb and become an amoeba.  My husband who usually has the manual dexterity associated with a bunch of bananas can just pick up the various bits and reassemble a plug in a nano-second.  Every time I have them to do I am determined to conquer it and refuse to call for help.  Eventually I don’t need to call for help as he can no longer stand the stamping and cussing and complaining which is emanating from the room I am working in. 

I have trouble with it all.  I can’t even strip the plastic off the wires without shredding most of the wires as well.  A twelve inch length of wire very soon becomes a lot shorter in my hands.  If I do succeed I then have trouble twisting the fiddly little wires together so there are no stray bits when they get shoved back into those teeny tiny holes.  They either remain obdurately scruffy or they break off.  Back to cutting some more off the wire.  If I actually manage all of that to get to step three, it appears that the teeny tiny holes are now all filled up with wires and/or plastic and yet you are required to shove the pins back in.  How?  The last ones I did I resorted to hammering them in with a small hammer – honestly, I did.

I calculate I now do about 2% of my plugs myself and that is still far too much!

Yes, I hate dolls house plugs. 

Again, it bears repeating this isn’t a series of articles designed to put you off.  You may very well find, like my husband, that doing the electrics in your dolls house is your metier. 

Ah, but when it is finished, what a joy.  Almost everyone I know prefers their house when it is ‘plugged in’.  All the colours are warmer and richer, many of the smaller details in your rooms are clearer and some how it just makes the house look lived in. 

To see more pictures and more details of the work take a look at my Wentworth Court blog