Just some purchases

As you know this is to document every tiddly bit of my project for me to warm my toes by in future years, so I do also note any purchases I make....

Last week I got some lovely fabrics from my absolutely favourite fabric lady,  Maria's Fabrics

I may have, at last solved the drapery issue!

At the start of this week I received delivery of a fabulous work light.  The lighting in this room is poor - north facing in the daylight and a poor ceiling light behind me casting shadows over anything I am working on in the evening.  This lamp has varying temperatures of light and various levels of brightness and it is well articulated to move in all sorts of directions, even the head swivels.

Tao Tronics dimmable eye protection LED lamp - huge range of prices if you go look for one.

Yesterday and today I received a long awaited order from Delph in two parts.

I left these three tinies on a card table to give a sense of the perfect scale....  hairspray, hand soap, nail polish.

Here is a little something I need to remember each day

Eight of these for the library.  I so want to punch little holes in little paper and fasten them in the rings inside.

Two phones - one for the Hive (basement workroom) and one for the library - my student lodger uses her mobile phone of course.

Twelve light switches - that will be fun (not) gluing those in place

Eleven wall sockets to finish off ones I already have here and there; ditto the above sentiment

A touch of Ikea for the apartment - bedroom? or replace the one I made in the sitting room?

Just a thought on this pandemic.  I was unpacking eighty (!!!) items of grocery today which had been delivered to me safely by Tesco (I have used the service for years) and was bemoaning the two 'swaps' and three 'not gots'.  I suddenly thought about my mother and realised how she would have thought all her Christmases had arrived together if she had been looking at what I had spread out before me.  At the beginning of the war in 1939 she was 23 years old with a new baby and her husband away, three years later mom lost her baby when she was just six weeks old.  She was bombed out three times losing her home each time.  By 1945 she had a new baby to take care of too.  During all this time and for even more years after the war she lived with rationing and had to figure out how to keep her family fed.

One adult per week:

• Bacon & Ham         4 oz
• Other meat            value of 1 shilling and 2 pence (equivalent to 2 chops)
• Butter                      2 oz
• Cheese                     2 oz
• Margarine              4 oz
• Cooking fat            4 oz
• Milk                       3 pints
• Sugar                    8 oz
• Preserves            1 lb every 2 months
• Tea                        2 oz
• Eggs                     1 fresh egg (plus allowance of dried egg)
• Sweets                  12 oz every 4 weeks

I was peeved I didn't have the exact rice I wanted.  Really !!!! 

 We are just asked to stay in our (for most of us) nice comfy homes for a while and have stuff brought to our door, how dare we even whisper a complaint.

Please stay home and save lives.

Clare Bell light

I am not sure if this is a show-and-tell or I am still just looking for absolution.

I am not even starting with forgive me, I have sinned....  not with this one.  When I very first began with minis we used to snow-bird in Naples Florida and it had the most glorious mini shop called Nancy's.  (Sadly no more)  One of the very first things in that shop that I ever fell in love with was a collection of Clare Bell lights and the one I loved most was a five candle Georgian candelabra.  It was beyond my budget and, anyway, my project was a modern house so of no use whatsoever.  That did not stop me from visiting Nancy's over the years to drool over it.  I have even checked it out now and then, online, in the years since then.

So on my recent spree I thought I would leave it in the lap of the gods and see if I could find one - they are almost as rare as hens' teeth.  If I could, I would have it..... and the gods were smiling and here it is.

I need to straighten the candles a little and it will be brighter when using electricity rather than a battery

It came from the USA.  It was pricey, plus huge postage, plus the risk of paying customs duty on it over here.  Luckily all that worked out OK once I had stopped blubbing about the hole in my bank.

Then...... dramatic drum roll....... this is what I unwrapped.  Four very winky-wonky candles and the fifth had no bulb

Flip! hate the idea/cost of returning it to the states!!

You're British, Don't panic....  I lifted the light and this was underneath.  

No idea what the bit of wire is for

So, with just a bit of fiddling around with the two-wire-plug-in nightmare bulb and we were good to go.  Ahhh, woops, still a bit of a problem as my music room hadn't been expecting a floor standing Georgian candelabra and it would make even less sense in the other two traditional rooms.  I decided it could go in the precarious corner sort of behind the door.  The (invisible) doorstop prevents it being knocked and it would be brought into the centre of the room any time the  quartet sets up to play.  I would tell myself any story to validate this piece. 😊

Lighting done and dusted

Lighting done and dusted  ........   w...e...l...l....... maybe......

After taking a photo of each room to note the work I did, I can see a lot more opportunities for adding some more lighting.  Talk about glutton for punishment.

Also, while I remember, the little power strips I have been writing about can come with switches for each terminal.  You could then group things together and turn on separately from other groups - all the ceiling lights or all the fires for example.  If you had two strips or not many lights you could have a switch for every single light in your house.  My strip is not switched.

The apartment sitting room.  The rooms are crying out for pictures on their walls but at least I think this one has enough lights.

The apartment kitchen/diner.  Way too many missed opportunities here.  In a very long time from now I am going to add pelmets under the cupboards and some under-cupboard lights and have a big think about whether I can get a light into the cooker hood and maybe even change the centre light to a group of recessed lights.  Why, Oh why am I only just seeing what the room needs at this point.

Apartment bedroom this is OK for lighting - phew!

This is lots brighter in real life - I am very happy with these recessed lights and would have put them in the apartment kitchen and in the mud room if I had realised how good they would be.  This library has climate controlled lighting, heating and humidity to preserve some very valuable books.  

Love the hall lighting - proper Georgian hall light and a glimpse of stairs and lights in the corridor behind.

Well all the fires lit up too so that's a happy place.  The dining room will depend on some additional candlelight for special occasions.....  I do have them when I come to dress all the rooms

As with the Georgian style formal dining room, this music room might want to add in some candles for its soirees.

This is the third formal Georgian style room and is again slightly under-lit to keep it traditional and cosy.

In the children's rec room I  still might add two modern wall lights to the back wall though they won't add much useful light and will use the space I had planned for two posters, soooo????  maybe not.  The door open on the right leading to a central corridor.  The corridor is also lit but its not showing up too well in this photo.  There is no way I can add another light in that space.  Lesson learned - over-light the 'hidden' places.

The jukebox  plays a song and lights up with alternating flashing lights dotted around all over it.

The mud room in the basement seems to have acquired a wonky light - that needs a bit of fixing.  I do like the under-cupboard lighting.

Not the greatest workroom lighting.  Again, this a room that could have done with recessed lights.  There is no way I am ripping up floors above to install them.

This is an overall shot to show you the relationship of one room to another.

Always remember most dollhouses are just the front slice of a house and there is another layer of rooms behind these.  There is a corridor on every floor running behind all the rooms you can see here leading off to the other rooms of the house.

In the roof space across the corridor from the kitchen entrance is another entrance to a larger apartment belonging to the housekeeper.  The door from the bedroom we can see here leads to a small shower room for this apartment and the other side of that wall is the bathroom belonging to the larger apartment where the housekeeper lives.

On the upstairs level there is a door into the music room on the right  (I forgot to open it and show you the light from the corridor) which leads into the corridor on this level.  You can see the upper hallway and stairs clearly through the open door in the library.  Across from that corridor are three bedrooms and bathrooms for the family.

On the ground floor level the entrance hall leads to a larger inner hall and staircase and to the back and side of that central hall is a very modern family kitchen/diner and family room combination taking up the whole width of the house.  This is where the family usually hang out together.

At the basement level there are several rooms from the days when the house had storage needs for food and drink and places for servants.  Some are still used for storage.  There is also a guest bedroom and bathroom, a laundry room and an office.   The hive (the workroom) that we can see here was once the housekeeper's room, the mud room was servants' hall and the rec room was a kitchen and scullery.  

Behind all of this and across a yard is a converted stables area.  So, all in all, this modest looking terraced Georgian house is a substantial property.

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Look what came today - might take a little break from building work.

Step by tiny step

I am supposed to be elsewhere eating but I am so excited by my house being lit I just had to share it with somebody.  How I wish you guys were just downstairs and I could yell you to come up and take a look.

There are some different colour lights as a couple of rooms have LEDs.  The library (upstairs right) has a lighting and humidity control system to protect some rare books and so that lighting is not the usual warm colour.  In the basement mud room there is strip lighting under the cupboards which are also 'white' LEDs.

 This is how I did it

Here is a list of the steps I take to connect my electrical fittings to the power supply.  It assumes a couple of things.  Firstly, you are wiring an English-style dollshouse which opens at the front, so you are able to take all your wires to the back of the house.  Secondly you don't care how it all looks when its connected up because (a) the back will never be seen or (b) like me, you are going to cover it all up with a piece of thick card or thin ply cut to the size of the back of the house, using magnets or Velcro tabs, mounted on some spacers.


1.  Check that all the wires are at the back of the project ready to go

2. Screw your power strip to the back of your project remembering to use the four little plastic spacers

3.  Select the wire you want to connect and remove about an inch of plastic sheathing to reveal the copper wires.  You will need to separate the two sides of the wire.  If you are lucky you can make a small snip with a sharp knife or scissors and then pull the two strips apart.  More often than not this doesn't work too well and bits of wire are exposed: in that case there is nothing for it but to cut down the centre channel between the sides very carefully.  If your wire is going to need extending you will need to have about two inches of the plastic separated.  You need this to put the heat-shrink tubing on to cover the join.  Almost all of my 32 lights did need longer wires to reach the power strip.

4. Does it need extending to reach the power strip?  If so, measure how much more wire you will need, cut from the roll and bare the ends on this piece as you did for the one that is attached to the light/fireplace/whatever.  This time you won't need an extra couple of inches of plastic sheathing pulled back; about half an inch to an inch will do.

5. Thread heat-shrink tubing on each wire where you have the two inch length separated

6.  Join the wires from your project piece to the add-on wire.  Strictly speaking I think this should be soldered, but I have never done that.   I am just extremely careful to note that they are successfully joined to each other and then I depend on the tubing (after it has shrunk) to keep them that way.

7. Use a hair dryer to shrink the tubing.  Don't be nervous about this, it needs to be held very close to do the job.  I had two kinds of tubing - some clear, soft sort, in a long coil which I bought somewhere by the metre and a packet of black pre-cut tubes.  The clear soft tubing melted more quickly and more efficiently than the black.

8.  Tape down the wire firmly at its exit point.  I do this to help prevent any movement on the position of the lamp or ceiling light or fire.  They can easily be bumped when you are dressing a room and they are best fixed in place as much as possible on both sides.

9. Label the wire.  Heaven forbid that anything needs attention in the future but if it did you really need to be able to find the pesky item easily.

10.  They are now all ready to be taken to the power strip.  Before I do this I laboriously check that each one is still working, using a 9v battery. **    I check the light is working at every step of the process because I want to know what stage a 'fault' is at, if one presents itself.  For example if I skipped this last set of checks and a light didn't come on when the the power was attached I wouldn't know if the problem was a bad joining of an extension wire or a poor connection to the power strip.  This is where you do need another pair of eyes - not possible to be at the back and front of the house at the same time.

11.  Calculate how many in each terminal.  I have 32 wires on this project and the power strip has ten terminals.  There is actually twenty little holes because they have a positive and negative marking for each number.  More about this later.  I, therefore, need to put three wires into each pair of holes eight times (24 wires).  The other eight wires will then be joined into two sets of four (8) for the other two terminals. This totals 32 wires reasonably divided across the ten terminals.

12.  Group lights together in threes and fours as explained and twist the wires together securely.  This bit is easy to do but quite hard to explain.  You have pulled your item's wire apart into effectively two wires - let's call one wire a right-hand wire and the other the left hand wire. In reality each of those is actually made up of three little copper wires not much thicker than a hair.  For our purposes they are being treated as if they were a single wire.  So what you have to do is take all the right hand wires from the  wires you have decided to connect up and twist them together very carefully.  Click on this picture to enlarge it for a clearer view.  You then do the same for the three left-hand wires.  

You only need a very short length, enough to go into the hole in the terminal.  You don't want any exposed wire showing above the terminal block.

13.  Push the wires firmly into the power strip all the way in until only the plastic is showing above the hole.  The strip comes with the screws undone and the holes open.  occasionally they made need unscrewing a little more if you are having difficulty getting the wires in.  Push one collection of wires into the plus and the other collection into the minus sides of a number and screw the screw in firmly to hold the wires in place and make the necessary electrical contact.  You can give them a very gentle tug to be sure they are in tightly.  

14.  Polarity.  The vast majority of electrical items for 1/12th miniatures have no polarity and so either of the two wires can go in the plus or the minus side without any problem.  Occasionally you may buy something which comes with some marking on the wire suggesting that isn't the case.  The positive wire could be marked red and the negative in black or blue.  I used some LED lights that were marked in this way.  You must be sure to join the negative wires only to other negative wires and the positive wires only to other positive wires.  They must then go into the terminals accordingly.  The negative goes into the hole with a minus sign and the positive into a hole with a plus sign.  My other half said it probably wouldn't matter in this case but I wasn't for risking it.  It takes no longer, just a little bit of extra paying attention.

15. Connect to the transformer.  Most transformers and power strips now come with a simple 'plug-and-play' connection like this one.  if they don't they will have very clear instructions as to how to connect one piece of kit to the other.

16.  Plug into your wall socket, switch on and stand back in amazement

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Conclusion

Having struggled my way through this over the last few days I can't in all honesty say it is an easy job or one that I don't mind doing.  It is fiddly and frustrating and annoying almost every step of the way but by the time you have committed a good deal of money and have some nice items requiring power, the choice to do it or not is no longer an option.

If you have about twelve or less items to light it is probably easiest to just stay with the plastic power strips and extend any wires using plug-in extensions.   Maybe even up to 24 items and using two power strips to keep your life very simple.

You could, of course, use this method for any size project by just adding in more strips but I think there would be a point where you will need more than one transformer and very soon it becomes very cumbersome.

I do think that once you are messing around with something like twenty or more things needing power and you are on the round-wiring rather than tape path, the only way to go is the Small World power strip I use.

There are no shortcuts or easy ways to do any of this be it copper tape system or round-wiring, white plastic power strips or the strip I am using - you will just have to flog away at it until it is done. I swear, very close to the end of the chore I began to think about whether it would have been a good idea to hire an electrician and let them fiddle about with it!!  Wonder if you could..............

I can honestly say, touch wood, my lighting has always worked for me without any 'it hasn't lit' issues to sort out and not even so much as a bulb going on the blink in the following months.  I do read frequently that some folk are having problems with things not working or going on the blink and can only imagine how extremely annoying that must be.  I would hate to have to sort out a lighting issue.  On that cheerful note, I wish you happy lighting.  Like childbirth, you quickly forget the pain once it is over and you are gazing at your beautiful creation.   

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I love peeking through the windows of dolls houses and its even more interesting at night.

I will be recording each room's lighting tomorrow (for me really) so that's probably a post you can skip.  

** I have just been told that some Chinese-made 3v lights don't like being tested on a battery and will 'blow'   I have never been unlucky this way but I thought I should pass this on.