Progress - Hallway

February 2014

Not all that much was going to be done to the Hallways. The main jobs were lowering the ceilings and painting the walls. The "painted wood" effect through the rear hallway area was too far gone in many places to be restored, and so a new paint job in contrasting neutral colours was proposed. However, it was decided to keep the panelled effect on these walls, since they would provide an attractive entrance-way through what was now going to be the front door of the house. Therefore, one of the first jobs was to salvage as much as possible of the beadwork used for the panelling so that they could be restored and re-attached to the walls after the lead-based paint had been removed from the walls.

March 2014

The Hallway ceilings were to be lowered about 200mm, and a new suspended ceiling installed in the front and rear hallways. The Hallway near the Stairwell was not to be lowered, because of the resultant difficulty in then integrating this lowered ceiling with the underneath of the stairs which take off from the Hallway ceiling.

One of the main advantages of the lowered ceiling is that it allowed many of the services (such as electrical wiring, plumbing and VMC ducting) to be hidden between the original and lowered ceiling. The large diameter hole through the cornice in the rear Hallway below is for VMC ducting.

June 2014

Not much happened in the Hallway in April and May apart from the placement of cables for the domotique system for the Hallway lights and some cabling for the security cameras at the front and rear doors. One other item that Jean-Baptiste has been working on is restoring the doorbell at the rear (soon to be front) door. This doorbell has a brass button that is pulled to ring the doorbell. The old bell is no longer functional, but J-B is re-wiring it (right) so that it can be connected to a modern programmable set of chimes that can be programmed to sound like an old doorbell, or the Hawthorn theme song or one of the many Pans on Fire tunes! Should be fun playing around with this (-:

August 2014

To make the Hallway functional for the the band tour this motnh, the ceilings were plastered in July and the electronics for the domotique lighting system were finished in August. The cabling for the security cameras was installed (at left), as were the sensors for the automatic lighting system (at right) in the Hallway, up the Stairwell, and on the landings at the entrance to the bedrooms on the first floor. This latter system works very well, and makes navigation of the public areas of the house very simple, especially when carrying something (such as a suitcase or two!).