A six-month build completed: finishing touches

 So I started this build on 11 June 2024 and I finished it today (apart from the hearth) on 29 December 2024 so it has taken me just over six months of off & on construction.  The siding and the shingling were pretty time consuming, so if you weren't doing either of those then it would be quicker.

The last week or so I've been been doing a number of small finishing jobs:

- touching up all the exterior paint where the glue used for the siding had seeped onto boards and was a bit shiny in the light.

- filling in the gaps in the interior window trim with a bit of wood glue applied with a fine tip glue bottle, then painting over that.

- Applying the gable finishing boards to the rear roof edges.

- touching up the paint in various places where I had either spilled over another bit of colour, or perhaps not quite got into a difficult corner.

- fashioning an inner mailbox aperture for the front door (to correspond to the mailbox cover on the exterior)

I built a faux non-functioning bathroom door for the attic and glued it into place.  As you can see by the scale figure, this would be an 'old house quirky door', as an adult will have to bend their head to go through.  But then there isn't a lot of headroom in the bathroom either, definitely a remodel to squeeze in an ensuite for the master bedroom.

I applied the fancy gable trim to the rear roof edges (purchased from Hobby's, and sprayed with two coats of white primer) and touched it all up with acrylic white paint to blend in.

I used my Brother Scan & Cut to cut out fancy trim from cardstock for the tower under eave area, sealing the cardstock with matt varnish then giving it a light coat of white acrylic paint. I didn't use the crude kit-supplied brackets, but maybe if I find some nice brackets in future, that aren't too big, then I could install them at the corners of the tower sides in between the trim pieces.

I'm fashioning a hearth for the fireplace and will give it a few coats of satin varnish then install it.

I installed the self-adhesive flock carpet that I bought from Poppets Dolly Bits into the bedroom, which was extremely tricky: as well as trying to get the carpet to stick into all the nooks and crannies without wrinkles, I also had to join two pieces while matching the pattern.  It came out pretty well, DH couldn't see the join.  I'm a bit nervous about using a self-adhesive product, I've found in the past that adhesive products such as doublesided tape, foam sticky pads etc. do not  stand up to the test of time and start letting go after several years, but we'll see.

So apart from gluing in the hearth, and thinking about how I could add a dust cover, the build is basically done I think.  Now it needs furnishing and accessorising, which is the part I struggle with.  I have some furniture ready to go in or kits ready to be built, but not nearly enough.  I'm contemplating taking some things out of other houses with a view to downsizing in future as well.  Plus I need to find somewhere in my real house to hang it on the wall.

Conclusion

This is a house I've had my eye on for decades, so it feels satisfying that I have finally accomplished the build - especially after the kit sat around waiting for 13 years for me to build it.  Given what I started with, I think it's turned out fairly well. I did not have access to much variety in Arts & Crafts style wallpaper but I'm pleased with what I chose. I like several of the Greenleaf house designs, they are so much more innovative than the typical boring 'bookcase' style house that is so popular here in the UK.  On the other hand, the wood quality is terrible in the Greenleaf diecut kits, with many pieces delaminating or even crumbling as you take them out of the sheets.  The scale of the trim, windows and doors is clunky; openings are not symetrical in size or location (bay windows I'm looking at you) and overall there is a definite children's play toy vibe rather than an accurate collector's scale replica.  Yes, you could put in a ton more work than I did and buy or make many more replacements such as better windows and doors, and turn out a stunning product by just using the base kit as a foundation. I chose a middle ground where I have retained the 80s play house vibe on the exterior but increased the accuracy in scale for the interior.

One of the initial difficulties I faced was the lack of clear close-up photos online of other McKinley builds.  The photos on the Greenleaf Forum are of poor quality and don't enlarge well, and the videos I found on Youtube, and a few other build blogs, don't always show the details that you want to see: like how big is the smaller attic room and how does it connect to the bigger attic room, and that sort of thing.  So I hope this blog might help other builders who are just starting out with their McKinley kit.  Good luck and enjoy the process!

Internal window trim, rear edge trim, the discard pile

 I have all the interior window trim glued in now. However, as previously mentioned, there are some unsightly gaps which I'm undecided how to tackle.  Trying to use my normal polyfilla or gooey decorator's filler seems like a recipe for disaster with the close proximity to the wallpaper and the window plastic.  I don't think paint will sufficiently fill the gaps, although I do need to touch up the paint now on all the internal window trim.

I had to sand some of the upright sticks to be thinner, to fit into the gaps on the very sides of the bays. Otherwise they would have overlapped onto the window glass as seen from outside, because of the acute angle of the bay window opening.

Rear edge trim

I am covering up the raw edges of the floors and walls with some 5mm dark strip wood, sprayed with a couple of coats of lacquer.  Right away it makes the house look so much more finished.

For finishing the edges of the roof, I have bought some smooth stripwood that is the same width as the provided crappy kit wood trim sticks. I am painting the stripwood white, then I'll glue it directly to the rear roof edges.  Then I will glue the plastic decorative trim on top of the stripwood.  I can't put it underneath because then it would be partly concealed by the stripwood.  I am not using the clumsy roof edge trim from the kit, not least because life is too short to try to fill and smooth all of the awful wood cut outs.

The discard pile

Yes, all of this is going to the dump because I don't think I need any of it.  I went through the remaining sheets while checking the layout diagrams just to make sure.  This is mostly the components I didn't use such as the fireplace wall, the bathroom window and bathroom cabinet, the stairs, door and window trim, window seats, chimney flues, and decorative trim for the roof.  I don't need to keep it as potentially useful scrap either, because I still have a lot of similar bits that I kept from my Willowcrest build.  Now that the build is almost over, I've been able to put away a lot of stuff that's been sitting out for ages like leftover wallpaper, cladding, templates etc.

Front door, internal windows

 Front Door

I painted the wrong side of the inner door in a contrast colour, to show through the 'panelling' openings in the exterior door.  I had already stained the inner door side facing into the interior, but felt it looked a little plain.  So I added a bit more 'panelling' on the inside using some strip wood.  The two doors are sandwiched together around the acrylic window plastic, and then glued in place. 

 However, I found that I had a funny gap at the top of the door opening, above the exterior door piece.  Also, some of the interior flooring was showing under the door.  I solved both problems by painting some thin molding and gluing it in place.

Looking at these pictures, I've just realised that I should have simulated a mail slot on the inside of the door as well.  Add it to the list.

Internal Windows

The Greenleaf windows for the Mckinley are assembled from separate components rather than being a 'window' that you just glue in.  On the outside is a window sill that sits into the window opening, then two upright sticks framing the opening, topped by a curved hood.  Over top of that construction, a second curved hood with deeper legs sits, as architectural trim.

On the inside, you glue the acrylic plastic screenprinted window to the inner wall, then once again add an inner window sill, two uprights, and a curved hood.  It all sounds fine, but in practice a lot of the die cut pieces are not quite the same size as each other, or do not match the window openings. And the window openings themselves are not quite in line with each other, so that the three windows of a bay can be slightly higher or lower than each other.  And the multi-sandwich construction results in a lot of layers visible around a window opening including the raw edge of the actual house side. Due to the many discrepancies, this multi-layer sandwich can look very untidy and misaligned.

For example, the one-piece oval window frames supplied for the tower windows were all bigger than the actual openings in the tower walls, yet not exactly the same size as each other.  I had to carve out the tower window openings with a dremel to enlarge them to the same size as the frames. 

So when it came time to glue the plastic windows to the interior of the openings, I realised I had a lot of tidying up to do.  I applied filler to the openings to try to level out or at least improve the look of the sandwich, and two more coats of paint over the filler.  Trying very hard not to get paint into my finished interior/exterior surfaces.  I found that the plastic windows, apart from the tower ovals, were all too tall for the openings and needed to be cut down so that the plastic wouldn't protrude beyond the interior trim.   The internal sill is not very deep so the window can't protrude much at all at the bottom of the opening - I'm going to need to glue in some additional trim under the window sills in a few places to hide the plastic.  I glued the windows in with Deluxe Materials Glue & Glaze, which is a water soluble glue.  Due to the discrepancies in the window openings, I had to be careful to line up the sash bars visually. Obviously I tried very hard NOT to get glue on the windows but failed in a few places and had to wipe it off with a damp towel later.  Having all the windows in suddenly makes it look like a proper house.

I've made a start on applying the inner trim. The window sills in the bedroom tower had protruded into the room, which I hadn't realised at the time was something I should have trimmed flush.  So I had to cut the plastic windows to rest on the sills, and I had to cut the inner window sill to fit around the protrusion.  I also found that in the Tower bay windows, the sills would hit each other so I had to trim the side window sills on the fly.  You could plan ahead and mitre the sills so that they fit together as one solid sill.  The kitchen bay was fine, the sills don't hit each other.

Bedroom

living room

kitchen/dining room

Inside the tower

A lot of the inner side trim sticks are either too long or too short and have to be trimmed, or are leaving gaps that I need to think how to deal with. And of course every piece of trim I apply, I am trying NOT to get glue spreading onto the window.  Then it gets on the window, and I try to wipe it away and make a bigger mess, then have to clean that up.... sigh.

Replacement wall hanging system

 This is meant to be a wall-hung house but the intended hanging mechanism is crude at best, and potentially disastrous at worst.  There are two holes in the back wall of the attic rooms, so on full view when looking in.  A second small surround of the same thin plywood is supplied, and the instructions are to glue the surround on the back on top of the hole in the back wall, thus creating a double thickness hole.  The hanging mechanism is to insert two screws into the wall so that their heads protrude slightly, and then place the house over the screws so that the holes receive the screws.  So either you have two screw heads sticking into your attic in full view, or, you balance the house so that the screws are only within the double thickness of thin plywood so that you can cover over the hole with wallpaper.  This would not only be quite precarious, but all the weight of the house is likely mostly on the small plywood surround with its minimal glued footprint.

I decided I didn't want to risk it and I had already covered over my holes with wallpaper.  After some thought, this is what I came up with.

So I have glued a wooden batten across the back of the house, with two mirror hanging plates screwed into it in such a way that the weight of the house will be taken by the wood, and not by the two small screws holding the metal plate in place.  The metal plate serves to prevent the house jumping off the screw head, but the screw head itself is inside a hole in the wood.

Not only should this be stronger because of the much larger glued footprint of the batten, but  I also (with heart in mouth) screwed through in two places into the house for extra strength.  I measured carefully so that my two screws will be concealed behind the false wall in the bedroom.

Mirror plate covering a shallow hole created with a Forstner drill bit

Screws going into the back wall of the house

Corner pads at the bottom of the house so that it will hang straight on the wall

First coat of paint on the back. I'm purposefully not painting the

battens because I don't want  paint marks rubbing off on my walls

The disadvantage of this solution is that the house will not sit quite flush with the wall, because of the batten.  I would rather accept that than come home to find all my hard work smashed on the floor!

Of course, I still have no idea where I am going to hang the house.  We have a lot of awkwardly placed radiators and windows in our old house.

Ground floor decoration, false stair treatment, starting front door

 This week I was installing the ground floor decoration which I purchased so many months ago, and for which I had previously done preparatory painting and staining. The ground floor decoration is basically complete now apart from touching up paint, installing a hearth, and installing the windows and front door.

In the dining room, I installed the cornice and skirting, and then the border and dado wallpapers, then the door moulding. I used a thin door moulding as the door is not full width, part of the illusion of greater depth than is actually available in this cut-down house.

False stair treatment

In the living room, I had to decide how to create the illusion that the staircase continues through the ceiling to the first floor (where the faux hallway is).  While I had built the fireplace wall to neatly finish at the ceiling, it needed more to help the illusion look real.  I decided to stop the cornicing short, about where the staircase opening would normally start, and then frame in a simple box which hides the top of the staircase.  I also later installed a bit of angled wallpaper border to suggest that it will follow the staircase angle to the upstairs.

In the living room, I wallpapered the room - managing a neater result on the bay window opening this time (compared to the bedroom) by wrapping a separate strip of wallpaper around the curved portion of the arch to start, then cutting the archway opening wallpaper into an arch shape across the top and the area below the arch so that it wraps around the upright sides and into the bay. I pasted wallpaper between the windows and horizontal strips across the bottom and top of the bay.  Once the window frames are installed, I don't think the seams will show.

I glued in the fireplace wall, prioritising a clean fit against the back wall because any gaps at the base were then hidden with trim.  Then I installed the cornicing, butting it against the fireplace wall on the left, but stopping short on the right as mentioned above.  Then the wallpaper border went on, including along the top of the bay window interior.

Finally I glued on the handrail of the staircase, the trim around the door, and installed the ceiling beams that hide the top of the stairwell.

The illusion when seen face onwards

Looking up at an angle, you can spot the fake

You can see in this picture how shallow the faux staircase really is

Front door

One of the final pieces I will use from the kit sheets is the front door.  There are two pieces: a front trim piece with four cut outs - two for windows and two to simulate panelling - which faces outwards. Mine fits into my door opening, so will appear recessed compared to the exterior door trim.  The other piece is the main door which on mine is a little bigger than the door opening so it will protrude into the interior of the living room.  The interior side will be seen inside, so I stained it.  The exterior side will only show through the openings in the front trim as rear panelling.  I don't want to use the rough kit trim internally so I have stained some wood trim which may actually be cornicing but I think will be ok for a feature door frame.

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.