Chapter IV: A House Wired
(Last updated May 6, 2001)

What a busy week this has been for our little dollhouse! Having had it's walls and floors all Gesso'ed, the house stood ready for the first big step in adding electricity to the house: the tapewiring. For those of you not familiar with tapewire, tapewire is a flat tape which contains both the positive and negative wires necessary to conduct electricity sealed inside plastic. You run the tapewire up and down the walls and ceilings of your house (anywhere you think you might like to later add an outlet, wall sconce, or ceiling fixture) and then later wallpaper over it (that part will be shown here, later). It's quite a bit easier than wiring a real house, and it makes you wonder why tapewiring hasn't caught on in the real world. Aside from the many fires it would cause (for dollhouses, there's a transformer which steps the voltage down from 120v to about 9v), one gets the impression it'd be a lot cheaper. Here you see the house with all of the taperuns in place (those are the shiny blue and red lines running up and down the walls of the house). The tapewire has a sticky backing so you pretty much just need to apply it like you would any kind of tape, but then you smoosh it down with a credit card. And after you've made your tapewire runs, you get to test them with the 'test probe,' (actually a little light with pokers which poke into the tapewire and test conductivity). When the test proble lights up, as it has in this photograph, you know that you've wired your house correctly. It also reminds you to turn off the power before tapping in anymore of the copper brads which act as junctions between the different tapewire runs. Hitting a copper brad with a little brass hammer while the power's still on, we found out, will cause some pretty little sparks to come shooting up out of the floor of your dollhouse. Oh, no! It's the attack of Miss Molly, the giant kitty! Well, that's it for this week! Check back next week for more updates, or click on the links below for previous weeks' installments. If you'd like to learn more about tapewiring, check out the Cir-Kits Concepts Inc. webpage. And as they say in the world of miniatures, "Always buy twice as much tapewire as you think you could ever possibly use." (They don't really say that, I just made that up). Anyway, click below for previous installments of Jackie' Dollhouse: Chapter I: Prologue (April 7, 2001) Chapter II: The Roof, The Roof, The Roof is Getting Higher (April 15, 2001) Chapter III: The House That Might've Been (April 21, 2001) Check back weekly for more updates to...

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