Welcome to my life . . . .

This is a blog about my passion: dollhouses and miniatures. This particular blog was started to follow my miniature dream: to create a Victorian Mansion. But work on my Mansion is slow. Very slow. Sloth slow. Ice Age glacier movement slow. Why? Because I am easily distracted by other personal miniature projects (I have 50+ roomboxes and 15 dollhouses in various stages of incompletion) and because I work for a miniature shop and am often up to my elbows in miniature projects that aren't mine! So, I thought, some artists work in a particular medium (woods, watercolors, clay, oils, etc.), I work in progress . . . .

Friday, October 24, 2014

Harborside Mansion's Pre Existing Condition

The Harborside Mansion that was brought in to us is gorgeous.  Such beautiful exterior colors!  The interior is still bare which is why the customer brought it to us.  She wants me to finish the inside with wallpapers and floorings and light fixtures she has picked out.  Sounds like a straightforward, easy job.  But this Harborside had a pre existing condition: the electrical.  Customer hired a friend to do the electrical.  There are parts that were cleverly done (attaching each level to it's own individual on/off switch at the foundation) and other parts that were done without thinking ahead to the next step.  Such as the bulk of wiring being brought up to the different levels of the house.  Since each level is on it's own switch, each level needed a run of tapewire brought up the wall.  Rather than run them side-by-side, the electrician ran them one on top of the other, creating a bulky wad which would look terrible under the wallpaper/flooring and possibly even break when I try to fit the papers/flooring tight to the corners . . .

But I simply couldn't remove the wad and tie them all to one run because underneath the foundation, the three different tapewire runs were connected to their individual switches!

The switches to operate each floor's lighting.

Under the house, the 3 levels are wired to 3 switches on the foundation
and must be kept on separate runs as it enters the house.
So I cut out the wad, separated the 3 different tapewire runs under the house (you can see I've already done that in the photo above) and wired them to new runs going into the house that aren't layered one on top of the other.
Each level now has it's own run that lays flat on the wood.
No more bulk that will look awful beneath the wallpapers/floorings!
The other electrical issue involved the chandeliers.  On the first and second levels, the customer wants the ceiling lights wired to the floors above.  But friend wired house with tapewires across the ceilings.  So we will be removing the ceiling wiring and running the wires across the floors above (yet still keeping them to the proper run so that they still turn on/off with the rest of the lights on their respective levels: don't want a chandelier on the first floor to stay on when all the table lamps gets turned off by the switch!).

Once this electrical is all sorted out, we'll start priming/painting some rooms and installing wallpapers, floorings, fixtures, and staircases in some other rooms!  Stay tuned!

No comments:

Post a Comment