Drawers finished, fireplace wall kit completed, starting ground floor decoration

 The drawers are finally finished, with the repairs completed to the trellis front that I had to break off to reverse the incorrect orientation.

I also gave a couple of final coats of white paint to the underside of the house, the two feet, and the underside of the porch trellis to tidy everything up underneath.

Fireplace wall kit

I spent most of this week putting together the Fireplace Wall Kit from Feffie's Cottage, as mentioned in the last post.  This is a lasercut kit that is custom designed to replace the McKinley's much cruder staircase/fireplace wall.  I found that for whatever reason, my ceiling was  1/4" shorter than the laser kit so I had to cut down the main pieces.  There were also several other pieces that didn't quite fit and needed tweaking but I have fed these back politely to the designer so that she can modify future production runs.  Overall it is quite a detailed kit with lots of drawers and two cupboards and a nicely detailed fireplace.  There is no getting around the fact that it is laser cut from plywood, so there are some sooty edges here and there, and some plywood edges showing.  But overall the effect is fairly good. The original kit, as per the stock image in the last post, comes with lasercut 2D banisters and newel post.  I replaced those with actual 3D banisters, cutting them down to be the same height and to have a little tab protruding at the base to fit into the laser cut hole in each stair step.  I also found a half-thickness newel post in my stash (no idea from where) so I laminated that to the original 2D newel post to add some dimension.  I haven't applied the top and bottom trim or glued in the handrail, I need to wait until the room is decorated and the fireplace wall installed, then I can hide any small gaps with the trim.

Starting ground floor decoration

Now that I know the dimensions of the fireplace wall and where it will go, I've started on the ground floor decoration:  flooring, wallpaper, border, skirting and cornice.  As a first step, I made patterns for the floors in both rooms and then cut those out of parquet effect decorative card.  The floor papers are still loose so I can put them safely away until the wallpapering is done.

Drawers, feet, and starting the fireplace wall kit

 As expected, the drawers have taken up an inordinate amount of time, filler and paint.  The drawers themselves were filled a bit, then several coats of paint applied on all sides excluding the bottoms of the Left and Right drawers.  The Centre drawer bottom needs to be painted because there is an inexplicable large hole in the base of the house (no idea why) and if the house is hung on the wall, then the Centre drawer bottom will be visible.

The fronts of the drawers get painted black, to show up the trellis fronts.

Meanwhile there was much filling and sanding of the sorry excuses for trellis.  Even in the sanding, more bits were breaking off.  I rubbed wood filler into the rough edges of the cut outs and into the worst gaps in the veneer, followed by sanding, followed by a first coat of paint to highlight the deficiencies.  Then a coat of gesso and more sanding, then some old thick acrylic paint just on the cut out edges to try to smooth them some more.  Then multiple coats of white emulsion before they began to look barely acceptable.

I also filled and painted the edges of the house around the drawer boxes because I don't want to add stripwood covering there - the drawers fronts fit snug against the house front.

Feet

The drawer front trellis will hang a little below the bottom edge of the house, so it was time to add the feet to the house to lift it up off the table.  Unfortunately the feet pieces in the kit are only about four inches long, which would make an already top-heavy and inclined to tip over house, even more unstable.  I discarded those and cut some longer feet from some of the leftover punched out panels, to give more stability.  If I do stand this house on a shelf, it will definitely need a safety leash connected to the wall to prevent accidents, like IKEA bookshelves used to come with.

I was working on the porch trellis at the same time.  It's important that all the trellis slants in the same direction so I had labelled which pieces were the front layer and which were back pieces.  Finally the trellis was in a sufficiently acceptable condition that I could first glue the two layers together, and then glue the trellis to the house.  I started with the porch, and then did the three drawer fronts, keeping the trellis level with the top edge of the drawer.

The reason there is still one black drawer front is because, despite my careful labelling, I still managed to glue one trellis with the wrong layer upwards.  So it was slanting in the opposite direction.  I've broken the offending trellis off the drawer front with a paint scraper and am currently making glue repairs to the resulting breakages.

The final step will be to finish the edges of the trellis fronts and apply a finish paint coat to the bottom of the house.  I keep having to remind myself that if the house gets hung on the wall (I still don't know if I will do that) then the underneath  of the house will be visible - also the underneath of otherwise hidden roof edges etc.

Starting the fireplace wall kit

Before I can do anything else to the ground floor, I need to install the fireplace and stair wall.  A crude version is supplied with the kit, but I invested in a much more refined custom kit from Feffie's Cottage in America, which she kindly shipped to the UK for me. 

Stock image

This is a lasercut kit which arrives in multiple carefully labelled little plastic bags - so many parts!  She has done so much pre-work to help with following her detailed directions.  All the cupboards and drawers actually open, so there are a lot of small bits.  I want my fireplace wall to be stained to go with my Arts and Crafts look.  So I've put each little bag into a receptacle to keep its contents segregated, and I am opening each one in turn to stain the little pieces.  I am trying hard not to get things mixed up or to lose anything.  I am sanding off some of the soot from the edges but at the same time I don't want to break things, also it is thin plywood so sanding exposes the ply edges more.  So my stain job won't make it look like solid wood but hopefully the overall look will be nice.  I'm using Rustin's Medium Oak spirit stain.

I am becoming very conscious that it is only a matter of weeks until Christmas, and the displaced houses that I moved upstairs to the dining room, to make room for this build, are cluttering up the decor.  DH is always supportive and says it doesn't matter.  But to me it will spoil the Christmas look of our dining room.  So I might move the houses back downstairs temporarily, in which case they might get in the way of the build a bit.  

Roof finished at last, attic trim, kitchen bay trim, drawers

 Shingling is done

The shingling is done, praise the sun.  Was really fed up with it by the end.  I finished off the ridgeline with the plastic trim I bought from Hobbycraft, cutting pieces to butt together unobtrusively to achieve the required length.  I had previously sprayed the plastic with matt white primer.  I applied another row or two of shingles to meet at a neat line along the trim and decided to stop there.  In theory there is room to add another partial row of shingles at the very top but that would not have made a neat angle with the trim and would have looked untidy, so I left it.  After cleaning up the various glue threads from the solvent glue, I gave the roofs a spray of protective laquer (masking off the rest of the house obviously), then finally I could glue on the tower roof. I signed my name and the date on the underside of the tower roof for future posterity, if anyone ever does renovations on the house in the future.  I also tidied up where the chimney meets the shingles.

Attic interior trim and beams

With the shingling finally done, I had some renewed energy to get on with a lot of other jobs.  You may notice in the pictures that I have added some ceiling beams to the big attic space, modelling these on online photos of tall rooms with beams.  I kept it simple so that there wouldn't be too many angles to cut.  I've also finished off the internal apex in both gables with trim, and applied trim to the various 'raw edges' where two planes are meeting inside the attic. So the attic interior is almost finished apart from applying the internal tower windows.  I've been holding off on installing the window 'glass' to avoid damage with all the exterior work.  Still to do also is the front gable trim to hide all the raw edges.

Kitchen bay trim

Returning to the lefthand, or rear bay window, I cut out a replacement for the missing central window hood, and painted and installed that.  I also filled and painted up the kit brackets that 'support' the bay and installed those.  And finally, I painted the top of the bay black and added a little metal filigree trim from my scraps box.

Drawers

I knew from reading other build blogs that everyone has trouble getting the under-house storage drawers to fit, so I did a dry fit with masking tape to test them.  The centre one fit fine.  The 'right hand drawer' as labelled in the parts illustration was too big for the right hand opening, but fit fine into the left hand opening.  The remaining 'left hand drawer' was too big for any aperture.  So I cut down the left hand drawer base and back pieces by about 3/8th of an inch to make it fit into the right hand opening, recutting the slots so that the sides will still fit.  I glued the three carcasses together and let them dry.

The drawer fronts need to fit fairly exactly so that the left front is covering over the left wall of the house, and the right front is almost meeting the porch extension, with equidistant gaps between both of them and the centre drawer.  I could glue the centre front on no problem, but because I had swapped the left and right drawers, I had to cut the slots in the fronts longer so that the original fronts could be adjusted to fit into the correct position.  I think I've got it right.  We'll see when the glue dries.

Meanwhile I punched out all the trellis pieces that go on the fronts of the drawers.  This was an awful job, with the splintery plywood shredding, splintering, and outright breaking even though I was pushing the cut-outs from the back and using a knife to help.  I've had to make several repairs with wood glue.  All the openings are rough and horrible, it is going to be a long job to fill them and try to smooth them out. Each drawer has two trellis pieces, with opposite orientation, so that you get a trellis effect when they are stacked (although very thick).  Because it's the same job, I also punched the trellis pieces for the porch base so that I can finish them all together.

Shingling - punishment for not paying more attention in school

 The shingling continues.  Eyeballing the middle and right hand slopes of the centre roof area, based on the lines drawn 5/8th of an inch apart on the left roof, did not work.  Not only were the shingle lines not lining up, the spacing between rows was inconsistent and it looked awful.  So out came the paint scraper and I broke off most of the shingles on the middle and right hand roofs to try again.

The next attempt I was carefully marking each row of the middle roof based on a ruler held along the bottom of the left and right shingle rows so that they would line up.  This also did not work: the middle roof rows were getting further apart to the point where the gap was going to exceed the height of a shingle.  Out came the paint scraper again.  Many shingles lost their lives in the retreat.

It was time to bring in the big guns: my son who has a major in Chemistry and now works in accounting.  The maths gene that skipped me is strong in him. Much to his entertainment, I explained my maths problem and provided photos.  He advised me to measure the angles of the roof pitches and from there it becomes a trigonometry problem.  I used a protractor to determine that the left hand gable was a 69 degree apex, whereas the bigger right hand gable was a 72.5 degree apex.  It seems likely that they are meant to be the same angle and it is down to the error inherent in putting together a plywood kit.  The middle roof I measured off a straight line on the right hand roof by folding paper into the angle, it appears to be at a 45 degree pitch.  Using this online calculator, setting the angle at 35 degrees (splitting the difference between the two gables) and setting the hypotenuse at 1.59 cm (5/8th of an inch) gave me the vertical height for one row on the lefthand roof.  Then I could use the same calculator to determine the hypotenuse for the same vertical height for a 45 degree angle.  That comes out at .72 of an inch, or 1.84cm.  So on the middle roof, I needed to mark lines that are just under 3/4" inch apart.

Trusting (skeptically) in the math, I corrected the lines on the middle roof and started sticking on shingles yet again.  By now I am heartily sick of all shingles and wishing I had just used shingle-printed paper.  Or paint.  At first it looked like once again the alignment wasn't working out, but I didn't care by this point.  However, as I got further up, it was looking increasingly okay - maybe not exactly aligned on all three roofs but close enough that you don't really notice.  

It wasn't until I broke into the second bag of shingles that I realised two things:  1) the new bag was split evenly between dark brown shingles and light shingles, no medium tones like the previous bag; and 2) all the rows I had done so far on the roof were in light shingles, unlike all the other roofs which had a mix of tones.  Presumably I'd used up all the mid-tones in previous attempts.  So after I had finished shingling the three roofs, I had to go back with a brush and some wood stain and darken random shingles across the roofs to blend in the darker shingles from the new bag.

So it's done up to the ridge line and now I need to decide how I am going to treat the ridgelines.

Build a dollshouse they said. It will be fun they said.

Stuck on shingling

 While I haven't been working on this a whole lot, when I have, I've been shingling.  It was straightforward to shingle the rear (left) roof. I haven't decided how I will treat the ridgeline yet.

The front roof (right side of house) was a bit trickier, fitting shingles around the tower, but still fairly straightforward.

The gable roofs, however, are a total PITA and thus I have been procrastinating mightily.

All three roofs have a different slope.  So in order for the rows of shingles to line up visually the way the viewer expects, they have to be laid at different spacing on each roof.  I drew lines on the right slope before I realised this. So I'm having to attach shingles one row at a time, using the spacing on the left as my guideline, and eyeballing the line around the other two sides -supplemented by measurements taken from the bottom of the valley up along the edge of the roof to keep the two sides the same. At the same time, I have to cut partial shingles to fit into the two inner valleys.  It is slowly getting there but not fun.

Tower roof covering, chimney

 I decided to go for a metal roofing look, like the New England photo I found, for the tower roof covering rather than attempting shingles on the narrow points.  I used the pattern I had traced of the roof triangles prior to assembly, and cut out segments in two pieces to simulate metal sheets overlapping.  The seams were covered with narrow strips of kraft paper scored down the middle with an embossing tool.  I glued it all on with solvent UHU to avoid moisture warping.  For the top, I dug around in my stash and found a jewellry finding that looked similar to the scalloped tips in my New England photos with a little plier squeezing.

Then I sprayed it black.

Then I gave it a wash with dark grey paint, and a drybrush with Patina coloured paint to create a weathered metal look.  I finished off with a protective spray of matt varnish.

The finished result.  I like it, it looks less 'twee' than shingles and also a lot neater.

Chimney

I covered the chimney pieces from the kit in brick paper prior to assembly.  Because I had added a back to the chimney, my side trim pieces needed to be recut to be a little longer.  Then I glued all the pieces together as per the kit instructions. This also got a protective spray of varnish. The flues that come with the kit are quite ridiculous, wo instead I added some low-key cornice trim used upside down to the top then painted that and the interior matt black.

The chimney glues into a slot in the roof.  I will need to fill and finish the underside of the slot in the ceiling of the attic room now.

I've started drawing lines on the roof to align the shingles.  I've hit the usual problem with two roof planes intersecting - the eye expects the rows of shingles to line up across the valley of the adjoining roofs, yet due to geometry, the hypotenuse of the resulting triangle is much longer so the intervals between shingles on the middle roof are significantly further apart than on the gable roofs.  Plus it's hard to get the gable roof lines to match each other since the starting points aren't the same.  I will probably end up just eyeballing it which is what I've had to do on past roof jobs.

Tower roof, tower decoration, chimney

 This week I've been finishing the exterior of the tower, above the porch.  I decided to go with the clapboard after all, and applied it up to the tower window level.  My husband agreed that stopping there looked a bit odd, so then I spent hours trying to shape pieces to go around the curved windows.  The siding I am using just splintered instantly if I tried to shape it, so I ended up using a mixture of thin plywood and even cardboard to fill in around the windows.  It still looks a bit odd, but less conspicuous.  The accumulation of error from the tower pieces not assembling into a perfect octogon continued to multiply, meaning that every piece of clapboard and trim had to be individually cut for its destination and it's all a bit asymetrical.  Maybe the owners hired a really bad carpenter :)

Eventually there will be pink or white roof brackets holding up the tower roof, on top of the deep pink board.

Tower roof

I strengthened the extension cone further with another layer of papier mache inside, and some wood glue into the tip.  I glued small pieces of coffee stirrer behind each protruding tower roof piece.  Once those were dry, I glued the extension cone down onto the tower overlapping the coffee stirrer pieces.  The end result is fairly sturdy.  I am procrastinating about attempting to shingle it.  When I was looking through my New England photos (see below) I found a great picture of a similar tower which is finished in lead or zinc, which would be a lot easier to simulate.

Chimney

I was getting ready to shingle the roof, and have glued on the strip wood at the bottom endge to lift the first row of shingles.  Luckily I suddenly remembered that the kit includes a chimney.  For some reason the chimney is only three sided and is open to the back.  So I cut a back piece from some scrap ply.  The kit also includes some weird pyramidal flues.  I've looked through my many photos of wooden Victorian houses from my New England holiday and none of their chimneys have flues like that, so I think I will just leave them off.  All the real chimneys were brick, so I will probably finish mine in brick as well.