Wirewright wires new builds and deep renovations across the Aveline valley, from the second design meeting to the evening we sit in the finished house and set the scenes with you.
Projects from $24,000. Lighting design $2,400, credited in full when we do the install.
I trained on sites where the electrician came through the door after everybody else and got blamed before anybody else. The ceilings were drawn, the joinery was made, and every good idea cost somebody money to undo.
In 2009 I started Wirewright with one rule that has not moved since. We come to the second design meeting, or we do not come at all. Seventeen years on we run two teams and take about nine houses a year, which is fewer than we could and about right for the way we work.
I still mark up every lighting plan myself, in pencil, usually on the kitchen table of whatever house we happen to be in. Then it gets drawn properly and issued the same week.
Emrys Tasker, Cottersley
Everything below starts with a survey or a drawing. Nothing below starts with a price over the phone.
We set out on the slab with the reflected ceiling plan in hand, first fix before the plasterer is booked, and come back for second fix after the decorator. One supervisor the whole way through.
From $24,000. Nine to fourteen weeks on site.
Houses where the plaster is coming off anyway. We chase only what has to be chased, run the rest in the floor void, and hand back a house that looks as though nothing happened to it.
From $24,000. Survey first, always.
Reflected ceiling plan at 1:50, circuit schedule, switching diagram and a fittings schedule with a budget for every room. Yours to build with any electrician you like.
$2,400, credited in full if we do the install.
The awkward one. We survey what is already in the walls, tell you plainly what can be saved and what cannot, and finish the job properly from there.
Priced after the survey, never before.
We do not do callouts. No fault finding at nine at night, no fuse changed on a Sunday, no consumer unit swapped in an afternoon. Two firms in Cottersley do that work very well and we will give you their numbers rather than pretend.
Every room we light gets four layers: ambient, task, accent and night. What changes room to room is the fittings, where the plates go and what it costs. Budgets here are fittings only, at the specification we would put on a drawing.
The room that gets over-lit more often than any other. We take the downlights out of the middle of the ceiling and put them where somebody is actually holding a knife.
Ambient
Six 2700K downlights on the perimeter
Aimed at the wall units rather than the floor, so the light comes back off the cabinet fronts and nobody chops in their own shadow.
Task
Linear LED under every wall unit, three pendants over the island
Pendants hung 30 inches above the stone and 30 inches apart, on one dimmer so they always come up together.
Accent
Warm strip inside the glazed dresser and over the pelmet
On its own circuit, because this is the layer people leave running when the kitchen is closed for the night.
Night
One 3W light under the island toe kick
Set to 2 percent after 11pm. Enough to find a glass, not enough to wake the house.
Two-gang plate inside the door at 1,100mm
Above the worktop line, so a bag of shopping on the counter never sits in front of it.
A second plate at the pantry end
Nobody should cross a dark kitchen to turn the kitchen on.
Nothing on the island
Islands get wiped down twice a day. A switch there is a call-back we would rather not design in.
Three quarters of our work arrives from eleven practices in the valley. This is what they are actually buying.
Ground floor at 1:50, marked up on the table at Tibbwell.
We sit in, usually before the ceilings are drawn. An hour there saves a week of chasing later, and it is where most of a lighting plan is actually decided. No charge and no obligation on either side.
Reflected ceiling plan at 1:50, circuit schedule, switching diagram, fittings schedule with a budget per room, and an emitter list your client can price anywhere they like. Issued as PDF and DWG, usually three weeks from the meeting.
We mark up the plasterer’s setting out, the joiner’s shop drawings and the kitchen elevations, because half of a lighting plan lives inside somebody else’s drawings and gets lost there.
One supervisor from setting out to handover. We commission in the evening with the lights off, and we come back once, at no charge, six months later to reset whatever the household has learned it wants differently.
A new build of about 4,000 square feet, start to handover. Renovations run shorter on site and longer on the calendar, because the house has opinions.
Week 0
Chalk on the slab with the architect and the builder. Two hours that decide everything after them.
Weeks 1 to 4
Cable, back boxes, containment, and the slots for the stair lights cut before the boards go on. Every run is photographed and filed before it is covered.
Weeks 5 to 8
We are not on site. Nobody warns clients about this gap, and it is why a nine week job reads as fourteen on a calendar.
Weeks 9 to 12
Fittings, plates and terminations. Plates go on after the decorator, which is why ours are not painted over.
Week 13
An evening with the lights off. We set the four scenes in every room with whoever is going to live there.
Week 14
Testing, certificates, the folder, and a walk round with the builder before we take the van off the drive.
Six things, in a box file with the house name on the spine. It is what a surveyor asks for when the house is sold in fifteen years, and it is the reason we photograph every run before it is covered.
Lic. #000000 (sample). $2M public liability. Every certificate is issued in the name of the supervisor who tested the job, not in the name of the company.
No travel charge inside 25 miles of Cottersley. Past that it is $0.68 a mile, written on the quote rather than added at the end.
The yard
31 of our 61 houses are inside this one town
12 minutes
Victorian renovations off the mill road, mostly
18 minutes
New builds on the south side, four in two years
24 minutes
Listed houses. More often design only than install
31 minutes
Barns. Long runs and no ceiling voids to hide them in
38 minutes
Our limit for a daily team. Past it we stay over
Budgets are the electrical package only, fittings included, as invoiced. Sample projects for this concept site.
The owner saw the framing projector at Aveline Row and added six more at second fix. It came to $4,900 and four days, priced before we started rather than argued about after.
No ceiling voids anywhere in the building. Every run went in the floor or in a service zone we agreed with the engineer in week one. We lost a week and the roof structure stayed exactly as it was.
Original cornices on both floors. We ran the whole first fix from the floor above and did not chase a single ceiling, which added about $3,100 and saved plasterwork nobody could have replaced.
Their own electrician built it straight from our drawings. We came back for a day to commission it, and the stair is one of the best things we have been part of.
They came to the second design meeting with a printed reflected ceiling plan for a house that did not have ceilings yet. I have not drawn a lighting layout myself since.
Iona Bracken, Bracken Architects
Sample note, written for this concept site
The plates went on after my decorator. In nineteen years of specifying interiors that had never once happened to me.
Sylvie Ottery, interior designer
Sample note, written for this concept site
Wirewright came in about twelve percent above the next quote. The variations came to nothing at all, so they finished as the cheapest of the three.
Aurelie Hensley, Sarsen & Hensley
Sample note, written for this concept site
About a quarter of it, yes. We ask for measured plans, and if there are none we will draw the ground floor ourselves for $600 before we quote anything, because a quote off a sketch helps nobody.
In full, against the first invoice, as long as first fix starts within twelve months of the drawings being issued. If you take the drawings to another electrician it stays a design fee, and the drawings are yours either way.
$24,000 of electrical work, or a lighting design on its own at $2,400. Below that we are the wrong firm, and we will tell you so on the phone in about two minutes rather than send a quote you will not like.
First fix slots usually sit eleven to sixteen weeks out. Design work starts sooner, often inside three weeks, which is one good reason to begin there.
One supervisor stays with the job from setting out to handover. Emrys takes the new builds, Oskar Tolme takes the renovations, and you will have both mobile numbers from the first week.
Gladly, and we would rather you did than settle for ours. We check the driver, the dimming protocol and the cut-out before anything is bought. It takes an hour and it has saved clients a great deal more than that.
An hour, at the practice or at the house, with the plans on the table. We bring a fittings box and a dimmer so you can see the difference between 2700K and 3000K on your own wall before anybody commits to anything.