Shining some light on things

At least I hope it will.  Stupidly I didn't order a lighting strip when I ordered the lights so have no way of testing them, which is sooooo frustrating.

So here's how I've gone about lighting so far.  For the living room and the dining room, I drilled a hole in the ceiling in the centre of the room then scraped a shallow channel from the hole to the chimney on the floor surface above.

 The chimney has an opening that goes all the way down to the base, and I drilled a hole in the base for the wires to come through.

 I learned from trying to remove the wires from the plug on the first light that it was too fiddly so now I just cut the plug off.   This allows me to feed the wire through the small hole in the floor from the ceiling side.  The light has an adhesive spot on the top but I also add a little bit of glue around the edge.  As the wire is pulled through the hole, the light is positioned against the ceiling and the wire is held in place on the floor above with tape while the glue dries.

Once the glue dries I double over some tape so that I can use it to cover the wire in the channel and make it possible to remove the wire if necessary later on.

Then I feed the wire through the channel ready to send it down the chimney, holding it in place.

I cover it with the doubled tape 

....and put more tape over each side to hold it in place.

And finally I can put the rest of the flooring down knowing that hopefully I will be able to remove the light and wiring later if I have to for some reason.

Here is the light in the dining room - sorry it's so dark but it gives you a bit of an idea.

The kitchen is a bit different because there is no fireplace conveniently in there with a passage for the wires right down to the base of the house.  So here I will have to tackle hiding the wire by taking it down the inside of a small outside wall.  And I'll do the same for the bathroom.

In the hallway once again there was no simple route to hide the wires.  I had in the beginning meant to put a channel in the wall and cover it with wallpaper but forgot to do that in my eagerness to get over the mental holdup I seemed to have developed over sticking to one project.

The solution I came to was to put a channel in the second bedroom (nursery) wall, taking it to a corner near the skirting board.   Once again the channel isn't neat and tidy or glamorous by any means, but it does the job.  I simply gouged it out with the scalpel and a nail file - rather rough and ready but it doesn't have to be very deep or wide for these little wires.

  Here's the wire fed through the channel and held with a bit of tape at the lower end.  From here it will run along behind the skirting board, behind the fireplace, and go down the chimney.

You might have noticed that I've also done the flooring in these four rooms too. It is slow work doing them because you have to put them in in two pieces, and wait for them to dry before you can go on with anything else in that area.  I use paint cans and clamps and anything heavy I can find to hold them down while the glue takes.  It looks rather comical, especially when I have to pack lots of small tins of paint on because of the shape of the room.

I'm not altogether happy with the join between the second bedroom and the hallway.  In all the fittings the join was perfect.  When I glued it the join was perfect.  But somehow when I put the weights on it to dry I must have moved it a bit and now there's a gap between the bedroom and the hallway - so disappointing when I know it was right.  There's also a gap as a consequence on the right of the doorway inside the room.  Both will have to be fixed which is a bit annoying because they shouldn't be there.

Inspired by having the flooring done, and determined to make a big step forward, I then went on with the trim in the hallway - all three door frames, then the skirting boards.  This went really well.  Then I decided that because the windows are so difficult to install later on, I would take the risk to install now.  They are so pretty - I really like them.  In this photo I still have tape holding the windows in place and a peg holding the wire for the light in place, but you get an idea.

Even more inspired by having the hallway completed, I got a bit carried away and forgot that I hadn't varnished the floor in there.  I then went ahead and installed the first floor ceiling/second floor.  And here are a couple of  photos - although they just look a mass of clamps at this stage.

Today is Good Friday.  I obviously won't have the house constructed by Easter since Easter is already here. Maybe by the end of Monday it might be nearing it, but it won't be fully decorated because I'm waiting for wallpaper to arrive for the dining room, nursery and one of the attic rooms.  I'm also waiting for tiles.  But I'll be happy if the actual construction is well underway, ready to tackle the shingling next week.  That Sydney fair is getting very close now!