Tasha's Kitchen - Wired and Ready!

It's truly a delightful feeling when you finish something complicated! At first, the task seems overwhelming. There are so many things to be done, so much could go wrong! And yet, step by step you go forward, slowly making progress until, finally, success! I'll start with a photo of Tasha's Kitchen with the lights and roof on. That was a big part of this week's goal, and in spite of a major setback to one aspect of my plan, this part came to pass wonderfully!

To get to this milestone moment, there was a lot of chicken or egg decisions to be considered. The plan was to have all of the wiring meet together under the house in the crawl space, then be joined together to a plug receptacle positioned to be accessed in the back of the room box.

Cabinet, under cabinet and fridge light wires.

Cabinet & Fan Light Wires

Receptacle Plug

All of the can lights and the three pendant lights had the wiring running up through the roof. Before they could be joined to the others in the hub, the roofing had to be finished and then the roof attached to the room box. All nine wires were consolidated into two strands which ran through a hole drilled between where the fascia board and back room box wall would be.

Can Light and Pendant Light Wires

Consolidated Wires Coming Thru Holes Between Fascia And Back Wall

Ceiling Wires All Tidied Up And Taped Down

Here's a photo of what the hub looks like after all the wires had been run, spliced and joined to the plug receptacle wire.

With the ceiling lights tidyied up, I was able to start the roofing. The kit came with strips of shingles that were made out of some very nice wood. This kit has been such a treasure and so enjoyable to work on! I was two strips short - the instructions said there should have been 30 and I only had 28. Luckily, because of the skylights, I ended up with 1-1/2 extra strips! The kit also included the ridge cap.

I applied the strips with hot glue. Some of you might gasp, but today's hot glue formulas are not the stuff of dollhouse horror stories from the 80's and 90's. Modern hot glue has a lot more holding power, and unless you are going to lift a dollhouse by it's shingles, it works amazingly well for dollhouse roofing. Your shingles will likely break before the hot glue fails. It makes shingle application so fast, as there is virtually no drying time. Other benefits are that it does not curl the wood, excess glue is easily removed and so staining post application is possible (unlike with many wood glues if any gets on the shingles) and there are no health risks from noxious fumes.

Once the strips were on, I painted a couple base layers in black.

To add a little asphalt texture, I mixed a small amount of regular beach sand with black paint. I applied a little to each shingle with a paint brush. The finer the sand, the finer the final texture. 

Once the shingles were finished, I was able to attach the roof and finish the wiring. I had 5 strands of wires running down the back of the room box. I drilled holes into the foundation to the crawl space where they met up at the hub.

And here you see the transformer wire plugged into the receptacle where it sits in the foundation.

It was such a joy to finish the wiring job, plug in the transformer wire, press the button for power and have every single light work as intended! Here is the inside of Tasha's Kitchen lit up and ready for her to begin "cooking"! Well, as soon as I put all of the cooking equipment in, of course. :O)

I did make some tremendous progress on the back panel, but the last step ended in disaster. I was truly  disheartened overnight, but realized the next morning that everything I'd done could be done again. And I learned a valuable lesson about what not to use epoxy for, in spite of YouTube recommendations.

Next week, I have optimism about how I'll share that, in spite of a major setback, the back panel came to a successful conclusion!

Have a wonderful and creative week, my friends!

xo xo,

Jodi