I'd first like to give a shout-out to my husband, who made this post possible by insulting my Christmas decorations. Also, to my friend Josh; who kept encouraging me and giving me alternate ideas I never would have though of, because I have absolutely no clue about what I'm doing half the time. This one is for you, guys.
This one's to say that all I can do is hope that you will read this post, 'cause this one's for you ohhhhhhhh,,,,
It's no secret that installing electricity into my dollhouse has pretty much been one of the most frustrating experiences of my entire life. Every time I got something working, another thing would break (my dollhouse is a lot like an actual house in that way). Get the tape wire all laid out, and one of the connections gets loose and cuts of power to half the house. Fix the connection and a fuse blows. Replace the fuse and the lead wire stops working. Top that off with the fact that there isn't a store that readily sells these items in any sort of geographically convenient location (I have to wait a week or so for them to get shipped to me), and you have a recipe for the worst do it yourself project ever.
Homer Simpson's projects had a higher success rate than mine did.
I won't lie, this really upset me. I consider myself to be a pretty handy person who can problem solve my way out of just about any craft-related crisis. The fact that I was unable to conquer what should be an incredibly simple task (according to all the youtube tutorials I watched), put me down in the dumps. Installing electricity was the first time I had failed so thoroughly in a very long time and I felt terrible. I needed a way to start feeling confident in my creative skills again, so I set my self up for success with a series of projects I knew I could rock at.
The first project? Cosplay. I went as Korra from "The Legend of Korra."
I am a 26 year old woman who isn't embarrassed to post this picture on the internet. The geek force is strong within me.
After that came a variety of other craft projects.
A Gundam-themed nutcracker for my husband:
Char Aznable
Char Aznutble
Some Quilted Ornaments:
And a wreath to put them in:
And I finished the giant, queen-sized, crocheted blanket that I started last Christmas:
I was working on all of these projects, starting a new school year, and doing online and in-person classes to keep my teaching license up to date. With how busy I was, it was very easy to forget the dollhouse-shaped elephant that lives in my dining room.
That is, until Thanksgiving rolled around.
I was lucky, as holiday breaks go. My school district gave us a full day off the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, instead of having us go a half day like most of the other schools in our area did. Mike and I were going to be traveling around to visit both sets of immediate family members, so we were going to be gone/exhausted for a good portion of the holiday weekend. In anticipation of this after Thanksgiving lethargy, I decided to get my Christmas decorations put up on that extra day off my school gifted me with. So I spent the morning trimming the tree and putting out the obligatory holiday knickknacks, and the house looked pretty darn good in my opinion!
Ohhhhh.....
So festive!
I was feeling pretty proud of my days work, and called Mike out to examine my handiwork. He came out, looked around, and complimented my decorating prowess. Then, he said something that would change the course of my entire holiday season.
"It looks really good out here! I can't help but notice that your dollhouse isn't decorated for the season, though."
I had just spent four hours decorating the house and the last thing I really wanted to hear was a well-worded version of "you missed a spot." So I did the only thing I could think of; I threw my money at the internet.
This problem-solving technique has a staggeringly high success rate.
After the tiny Christmas decorations were ordered, I spent some time browsing around the miniature site, checking out their new merchandise and clearance items. It was then I realized how much I really missed spending time in my miniature world. I suddenly couldn't wait to string up tiny garlands, or hang an impossibly small wreath on the front door. I wanted to be able to do more than just stick decorations to the outside of the house; I wanted a nicely decorated tree in the window of a fully furnished living room, seasonal foods laid out in the kitchen, and endearingly small stockings hung in front of the fireplace.
I wanted to work on the interior of my house, and I wasn't going to get there until the electricity was working.
Suddenly, I was filled with something I'd been lacking for months: motivation. And after that, I really don't know what happened. I pulled a chair up to my dollhouse, took out my wiring kit, and the rest of the time is sort of a blurry mash-up of replacing fuses and fixing connections. I was working with very little thought outside of 'I have to get this done', and along the way I stumbled upon the correct mixture of working parts and dumb luck. After a solid three house of working I was rewarded with this beautiful sight:
"My God, it's full of stars!"
Every single light is on, shinning at full power.
I turned off all the house lights and just stared at this for a while.
I really couldn't believe it - it was done. The electricity was successfully installed. Everything was working. It was pretty late at night by this point, and I was exhausted and overwhelmed by my accomplishment. I may or may not have gotten a little verklempt.
I'm not crying.
A few days later, my decorations arrived.
Happy Holidays, from the house inside of my house to yours!
Had I known how much trouble it would have been to install electricity, I would have given up before I started and declared them to be Amish and moved on with my life. But I'm in for a penny and in for a pound (literally) because my transformers keep blowing up! The one that originally came with my electrical set died, and as near as I can figure the one that I bought to replace it did too! The good news is I managed to get one of the previously non-working lamps illuminating before achieving total power loss, so my house is up to the grand total of having 3 out of 11 lights functioning (when I can get electricity actually running into the darn thing!)
Despite an uncanny physical resemblance, Thomas Edison I am not.
But, I was determined to do some miniature work this weekend, so I put aside my electrical difficulties and got a couple mini-projects done. The first of which I was determined to get done today (5/5, my one year wedding anniversary), to commemorate the special occasion in miniature. Because that is how I live my life - it doesn't happen until it's been replicated in 1/12 scale.
One of the many excellent gifts my wedding photographer, Melissa Arlena, gave to me were these wonderful business cards with pictures from my wedding on them.
It's like a series of trading cards that no one would want to collect but me.
So, I cruised around on the online miniatures store (as I'm oft to do in my free time), and found a frame that I thought would fit my chosen business card portrait well.
It came with a mat, which was a nice touch. I didn't use it, but it was still nice!
I then used all of my artistic composition knowledge to figure out my alignment of the image inside the frame.
You can't handle my "Rule of Thirds" skills!
Then I simply cut to fit and glued a back piece onto the reverse side of the frame.
Ta-da!
Fun fact: Shortly after taking this picture, I dropped the frame and chipped it on the side. I filled in the gap with superglue and used some gold paint I had laying around to fix it. I'm so clumsy it hurts. But, in the end I still ended up with a nice little wedding memento to hang in my little living room!
I also worked on creating an outside address plaque for the front porch with these neat little cast metal numbers I picked up on a whim during my last order.
My first step was to cut the metal that was holding the numbers I wanted. I then veeeery carefully sanded the protruding metal flashing from the tops and bottoms of the numbers because they were very pointy from being cut and would look incredibly sloppy if left on.
I only got one set, so I had to choose a house number that didn't use the same digit twice. I settled on my first (and current) house number: 8759.
After that, I got to work building the plaque. This was a spur of the moment thing, so I just used whatever I had lying around. I have a huge box full of supplies left over from when Papa was building the house (thanks, Papa!), so I rooted around in there and found some pre-painted balsa wood strips and cedar roofing shingles and made it work like I was Tim Gunn on "Project Runway."
I trimmed down the shingle to make it more rectangular and less "boxy"
I split the balsa strips in half lengthwise to make a narrow frame to go around the border of the plaque
Checking the first number for fit before gluing it down.
The finished plaque. It's sideways because this is how I was working on it.
And here it is mounted in place on the front porch! Now the mailman won't get confused when delivering to all the other houses in my living room.
The last project I'm posting I actually finished a few weeks back, but I'm posting it today because I was so frustrated with all my electricity issues that the idea of typing about a lamp made me want to punch a dolphin square in the face, so I didn't.
Anyway, I installed that "Tiffany" lamp I customized a few posts back and actually have it hooked up properly. It looks very fetching when there's power in the house for it to run on. I drilled the hole in the ceiling for the lamp wire to run through, but the area where the lamp met the ceiling looked very plain, so I decided to add on a ceiling plate to fancy it up a little bit. With that goal in mind, I rooted around in my craft room for every yellow/gold colored button/doodad I could find and came up with the following selection:
Little Mermaid ain't got nothing on my collection of thing-a-ma-bobs.
I picked out the one I liked and got to work drilling a hole thorough the center for the wire to run.
Here it is with the ceiling plate installed. I think it adds to the overall look of the chandelier quite nicely!
This post has been delayed for a few reasons; a couple of them were even out of my direct control! One of them being that the majority of the fixtures I chose to light my house were on back order and I had to wait longer than I would have liked for them to come in. The second of which is that installing dollhouse electricity is daunting, grueling, wrist aggravating work at the best of times and completely unmanageable at the worst. I have a new found respect for electricians after installing 30ft of wire, and I didn't have to mess around with running my wires through walls or studs - I just had to tape stuff to floors.
Seriously, this is pretty accurate representation of what I've been doing for weeks- just at 1/12th scale.
But the main reason for the delay in this post is that I had to do a whole lot of mental preparation before embarking on the electric installation. You see, for a great many years I have been terrified of electricity.
Seriously, unabashedly, petrified.
And Jiminey Cricket is to blame.
Yep. This guy.
Way back in the day when I was homeschooled (and the Disney channel actually showed Disney animation), they had these weird, faux-commercial breaks where they would showcase classic Disney shorts; a number of them starred that smug, aforementioned cricket. Mr. Cricket had a number of PSA skits that warned kids of the dangers of everyday things, like water, bicycles, or fun (not even kidding about that one) called "I'm No Fool."
Here he is singing his signature jaunty tune about not being an idiot and getting yourself killed.
And, considering how this post is all about how a cartoon character kicked off my long-held fear of anything that can be measured in volts, amps, or watts; I think you can guess what he warned me about through song one day:
Electricity.
I know, I Know, and I KNOW how stupid it is to have fear of ANYTHING instilled by a musical PSA, but I really couldn't help it. Despite video of this song not existing on Youtube, I can still see in my head that dumb cricket swinging his umbrella and assuring me that I can "...live to be 103!" if I don't fool around with electricity; and then driving the point home by drawing chalk-board pictures of people getting electrocuted while making toast or sticking things into sockets. In my defense, I was 7 years old at the time, and I was a very gullible 7 year old (I believed for many years that Mayonnaise was harvested by 'milking' the Mayo plants in South America thanks to my older brother.)
So for years I went out of my way to avoid anything and everything that I felt put me at an unreasonable risk of getting my fool self electrocuted (read: anything more advanced than changing a light bulb). I talked, bribed, and baked my way out of any home repair project that directly led to a breaker box and no one was any the wiser that an animated bug had full control over any facet of my life.
And then I get the genius idea to install electricity into my dollhouse. I knew it was something that I really wanted to have in my house, and if I left it out then I would regret not making the most of the great gift I'd been given.
So, I screwed my courage to the sticking place and bought an electrical kit; cricket be damned!
My transformer (non-Cybertronian variety), tape wire, lead in wire, outlets, brads, plugs, hold punch, bonus lamp I won't use, and instruction guide.
Even though I had my lighting kit and a whole front-load of wiring work I needed to get done before my fixtures arrived, I was incredibly hesitant to get started on this project. Even though the house is small, the idea of electricity felt very big to me. The voltage was small, but so was my courage. So I did everything I could to prep myself for my task at hand: I studied. That "Tapewire Instruction Book" became one of my sole sources of print entertainment for over a week. I studied the diagrams and recommended techniques until I could see them in my minds eye without having to open a single page. The more I learned, the less intimidated I became.
And then one Saturday morning I bit the bullet and plugged in.
And I've really never been more proud of myself.
I started by mapping out where I thought my tape wire would run. This ended up being more like a 'recommended route' than actual map. I'm like the MapQuest of laying wire.
The post on the right is where I did actually end up running my main electric line. That was really the only part of the original plan I ended up sticking to.
My dollhouse doors are hung on piano hinges, which prevented me from running electricity to the doors. If there were two hinges on each door I could have run the positive line through one and the negative line through the other to provide electricity to the front of the house.
Like so.
I'm actually glad that I have the piano hinge, though. It prevents me from running electricity to the porch, but at the same time I really, Really, REALLY would have hated to rehang those doors by myself. I'll just buy some battery operated porch lights and no one will be any the wiser, and I save myself a roughly estimated bajillion hours of door attaching.
Electricity is being run though my house via tape wire - a flat, self-adhesive strip of parallel running copper ribbons. It's easily cut, peeled, and stuck to walls; and was the easiest part of the installation process.
Totally hassle-free.
The bottom of my dollhouse has a textured foundation, so I did a test to see if the tape wire would adhere.
And adhere it did!
This is the lead in wire. This connects to the transformer and circuit breaker. I'll later camouflage this with...something. TBD. Maybe some shrubbery.
I needed to run my main tape wire line up to the attic, but didn't have a clear opening. So I made one.
The main line: fully installed.
This is how you join separate pieces of tape wire. You use this delightfully wicked hole punching-tool to create pilot holes for inserting copper brads. You connect copper line to copper line and blue line to blue line and presto!: a completed circuit! It's not a complicated process, just wickedly difficult to do on a small scale.
How small, you ask?
This small.
Or, if you need a scale reference: this small.
But a lot of the time consuming nature of this task is the testing; or more specifically all the backtracking you have to do if the testing fails. Every time you lay down a new line of tape wire you need to test to make sure that your copper brads are connected correctly and that electricity is flowing to the new tape you laid down. You do this with a test probe - which is pretty much a barbecue fork with a lightbulb on the end. You jab the prongs into both sides of the copper ribbon, and if the bulb lights up you have successfully installed the wire.
My electric fork.
My first attempts didn't go so well. There is apparently a subtle art to jabbing holes into copper that I wasn't privy to.
I got the hang of it pretty soon, though.
Attic
Master Bedroom
Kid's Room
Upstairs Hall
Bathroom
Kitchen/Dining
Main Entryway
Living Room
As you can see in the 'Living Room' photo above, I installed a ceiling fan to give me a nice, bright visual to signal that I had the dollhouse plugged in and wouldn't shock myself. I have three of those ceiling fans set to install in various rooms in the house. I really like the ceiling fans except for one detail: the fan blades.
This is the ugliest wood color I have ever seen. It looks like they ripped them out of a 1970's ranch house. Ughghg.
So, I painted those suckers with an acrylic glaze I made and they look So. Much. BETTER.
Left: Nice, cherry colored fan blades. Right: the fan blade personification of 'terrible'.
I was also disappointed with the chandelier I bought for the dining room. What I expected to get was this:
The "Tiffany" amber chandelier.
What I actually got.
The shape of the lamp is spot-on, but I was really hoping for a deeper amber color to the shade. The white seam coloring also wasn't as crisply applied as I would have liked, so I did what any artist does and made more work for myself than was probably necessary. I grabbed some sharpie markers and set about to altering the chandelier and giving it a more 'stained glass' appearance.
Starting out: featuring some concept illustrations. Despite the fact that it looks like I mostly fly by the seat of my pants I actually plan out most of what I do. Sometimes.
The finished product! Not quite "Tiffany", but also not quite as shabby as before.
I was going to end this blog post with a picture of all the lights installed in my dollhouse, but as soon as I finished installing all the lights on the first floor the transformer blew out. Pardon me while I go throw money at my problems.
