PART 3 -- Putting the Plan to Work

My Order Has Arrived

Below are pictures of what I got from www.modeltrainsoftware.com plus what I already had. The ruler is in photo to show size relations.

I already had some shrink tubing and the flickering fire kit for the pot-belly stove. The adapter, power jack, switch and ten lights are new. Now I had to plan where I wanted all of this stuff to go.

So far, I have only put together the 3 walls on the foundation and finished the foundation outside with faux stone. The underside of this building has a very nice hollow space for my wiring, but I will need to do my soldering of wires with the building on its side, so I won’t finish all of the outside until the wiring is complete.

I began by drilling a small nail sized hole in the back left corner of my building’s floor.

[Note: later I realized that I also need a larger hole along the left side wall where the faux stone backing for the pot-belly stove will be. Fortunately, I installed a false floor, not glued down when I discovered the need for the added hole. A lot of problems can be eliminated if one builds a false interior: walls, floors, and ceiling.]

In this building, there is an attic. The floor to the attic slides into slots in the left and right wall (as seen when looking into the open side of the cottage). I want to always be able to move this floor in and out in order to make working on the interior easier. Hence, I plan to run the wires from the porch fixture through a hole in the porch roof, into the floor slot, along the top of the wall and down to the hole.

The photo below is taken at a later stage of this project. The red/black lines show where the porch light's wires will be placed.

(Please ignore the crooked piece under the window. It will be hidden. Pixies came and moved it in the night while the glue was drying. <grin>)

Planning really is important, but I've kept my options open!

The first actual installation is the power jack and hole for a switch.

  

Here is the finished installation of the power jack and switch.

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Below is my first plan for wiring this project, but I learned as the building progressed that I really only needed to decide where I wanted the power jack and switch. I include the first plan here, so you can see how much changed as I began to complete the structure and saw much better places for LEDs and better hiding places to run the wiring.

So here is what I wrote back then:

Basically the power will come in to the base of the structure via a power jack placed in the far left corner behind where the pot-belly stove will be. [I later changed the location of pot-belly stove]

Think phone jack or the way you connect some laptop computers to a power cord.

From there the positive wire (red) runs up through a tiny hole in the floor. The negative wire (black) runs along the base up to near the 'open' end of the shop where it will be connected to the switch. The switch will be near where it is easy to reach instead of at the back of the building.

The switch has a black wire that leads into it from the power jack and one that exits from it. That is where the black wire from the LED attaches.

First, I will attach the pot-belly stove flickering lights to the power red and black. Next, I'll build my porch light and run a red and black wire all the way back down to the connection behind the pot-belly stove and hook it in.

I'll do the same with every other light. Each will have its own black and red wire running back to the connection behind the pot belly stove. I haven't thought through how I will hide all of these wires, but there will be plenty of places behind the bare studs of the interior.

 

Boy, have things changed!

You did not need to know all of the above, but I thought it might help you to feel better about attempting this LED wiring stuff if you knew that I had stumbled around a lot with this project. Of course, I continued to ask questions of experts while building.

Now I know that this wiring is much simpler than I had originally thought. All I need to do is decide where I want an LED installed, install it, and then run the wires back down to the wires underneath the building. I can add more lights if I wish!

Yes, that is correct. Each light will have a black and a red wire running from the LED down through a hole to the underside of the building. The only thing I must deal with is where to hide those wires. No circuits, as long as there are fewer than 50 LED bulbs.