I wasn’t planning to electrify the bay window addition on the Mansard Victorian, but a few weeks ago I nabbed two Clare-Bell sconces on eBay that match the chandelier I’m using in the living room. And hey, you can’t have too many lights, right? (Don’t answer that.)

I already have wallpaper on the other side of the wall, so I can’t feed the wires through to that side. Instead, I’ll hide the sconce wires behind a false wall.

I started by cutting a piece of thin cardboard to fit inside the opening of the addition. This cardboard came off the back of a spiral-bound notebook I was finished with.

I taped this to the wall, with the bottom lined up with the bottom of the doorway.

From the other side, I traced the opening, and then cut it out with an Xacto knife.

Here’s a view of the false wall through the window.

I held a piece of trim up to the side of the doorway to see how the sconce will look. If I’d planned to put sconces here from the beginning, I might have made the doorway a little smaller so there would be more wall here, but the sconce fits.

When I cut this opening in the wall, I made it slightly skinnier on the right than the left. Maybe it was so the wall would look centered when you view it from the other side? Maybe it was a mistake? I don’t remember. Anyway, the sconce feels too cramped on this side.

I can make this side match the other side by adding a piece of strip wood inside the doorway.

The trim will cover the added strip wood, so no one will be the wiser. (Except you, because I just told you.)

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Every time I’ve sat down at the Mansard Victorian lately, I’ve stared at it for about fifteen minutes and then got up and walked away. I have done a little more with the electricity following my last post — I was waiting to post about it until I was a little further along — but I decided might as well post it now since I feel my attention drifting, and sometimes that can last for years. (Ack, don’t jinx it!)

When I left off, I’d made a bump-out for the kitchen and planned to run the wire for the light under ceiling paper glued to a piece of cardboard. The cardboard would also allow me to add a ceiling light to the main part of the room without drilling through the floor (see this post for an example). Both wires would stretch into the stairwell, where I would plug them in the same way as the foyer lights.

I planned to use a brass ceiling fixture that I’d painted green. The problem is, the wire on this fixture is too short to reach the stairs.

I thought about soldering it to a longer wire, but the wire is super delicate and I was concerned about the connection breaking down and being inaccessible under the ceiling paper and cardboard. (Hey, it’s happened before…) Having a connection go bad once I’m unable to reach it is exactly what I’m trying to avoid by using a power strip in this house.

The other problem is that the cardboard would make the ceiling a tad lower than the rest of the ceilings on the first floor. Since you see all the rooms at once with this house, I didn’t want that.

So I vetoed the cardboard ceiling, flipped the house over, and glued the paper directly to the kitchen ceiling. The blank stripe is where the wall between the kitchen and foyer will be glued in.

Now, how to drill into the ceiling when there’s only five inches of space between the floor and the ceiling? The drill wouldn’t fit. Years ago I solved this problem in the Queen Anne Rowhouse by using a very long drill bit and going in through the base of the house. I couldn’t find it with the rest of the drill bits so I asked Geoff to get it out for me.

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