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.

Roof skylight, tower roof, porch side exterior decoration

 This project was in hiatus for a few weeks because I've been busy with some travel and other stuff.  I did visit the big dollshouse fair Miniatura hoping to find some more shingles, some roof finials and trim, a bed, and more stripwood - and found none of those things.  I did find a kit for two chairs for the living room, and a 3D printed wicker armchair for the tower room.

So after Miniatura, I ordered more shingles from Hobby's which luckily appear to be the same kind as what I've been using, plus some stripwood and also some plastic gable trim which looks interesting.  I also ordered a white metal bed kit from Dolls House Direct for the attic room.

Before I left, I had applied some clapboard on the porch side to either side of the tower, and started applying some pink shingles under the bedroom windows.  I've added some trim above the windows which I need to finesse to seal the cracks, but I don't really know what I am doing in terms of decorating the higher part of the tower.  I don't fancy cutting clapboard to fit around the windows - I did that on my Willowcrest and it's a PITB.

So I skipped ahead and assembled the tower roof - using the technique developed by other clever people, of assembling the eight panels with masking tape hinges upside down in a pot, then dropping in the top and bottom spacers with glue around the edges and leaving it all to dry.  However, I don't like the truncated peak of the kit roof and would prefer it to be a full point.  So I traced around one of the roof pieces beforehand, and extended the lines to create a pattern for an upper cone.  I cut the upper cone out in mat board and in the picture I am trying to solidify it with some glue in the joints and some paper towel applied over.  Then I can take it off and strengthen it some more from the inside.

I can't glue the tower roof on until I've shingled the main roof, and before I could do that, I needed to finish the skylight I previously cut in the back roof to let some light into the bathroom.  I framed the opening out with popsicle sticks and cut some plexiglas to fit the hole.

Roof light glued in place

Porch decoration, shingling porch roof, shingling kitchen bay

 I glued on the rest of the porch pieces (apart from the basement trellis).  I found that the porch roof, even when seated correctly onto the tabs in the front and back porch pieces, sat well away from the house wall leaving a gap of c 3/16".  So after the porch had dried, I filled the fat gap with pieces of stripwood then shaved them down level with the roof after they dried.  I found that the gingerbread railing supports were not all the same height, so I had to do a bit of sanding to even them out before gluing on the railing.  I also found that positioning the fascia board along the porch top trim piece so that the amount of exposed brackets mirrored those of the front porch piece, resulted in the fascia sticking up too high for the roof to fit correctly.  So I had to trim and test a few times to cut the fascia down to the correct height.

For some reason, the kit doesn't include a top piece of trim for the back porch piece, to fill in above the two columns in symetry with the front porch piece.  So I painted up a spare piece of door trim and glued it in.  I still need to touch up the ceiling join.

I chose to glue on stripwood to trim the rough edges of the porch roof instead of painting up the kit's chunky trim.  I also glued on a thin bit of stripwood to lift up the first row of shingles to the correct angle.  In preparation for shingling, I drew on guidelines (I use my quilting rulers for this sort of job).

I'm using an ancient part bag of cedar shingles which may well be left over from my first ever dollshouse (built c 1981) because they are the perfect colour, just like the picture on the box lid (probably because they are the same era as the house design).  I shouldn't use them really, because I won't have enough for the main roof, but I couldn't resist.  I wonder if I will be able to find matching ones.  I'm gluing them on with nice solvent-filled UHU glue that I was able to order online (shops only sell the non-solvent kind now which doesn't stick well). It works great and grabs quickly, the only drawback is getting cobwebby strings of glue floating around. When I need to shape the shingles, I trim them with my increasingly-dull cutting shears or just with scissors, but it's tricky as they are very splitty.

I added a bit more bling with some painted wooden balls and domes.

I did the kitchen bay roof in the same way, and filled in the gaps between the roof sides with some stained kebab skewer.

The house is looking more like its finished silhouette.

Now that the porch roof is shingled, I can continue with the exterior treatment on that side.

Siding finished on kitchen wall; exterior treatment inside porch area.

 The siding is done on the kitchen bay side of the house.  I finished the top with a white strip as it was going to be too awkward trying to fit siding under the deep eaves of the roofline.  I've touched up the cut ends and it looks pretty good now.

Porch interior

It seemed much easier to finish the exterior treatment inside the porch area, before installing the rest of the porch pieces.  So I positioned the porch roof temporarily and drew along it to define the working area.

I applied siding to the base of the bay in the same way I did the kitchen bay.  Above the windows, I started the siding with a piece of moulding painted white, then continued up into the roof contours. Then I touched up the cut edges with blue paint as before.

I also wanted to add some 'painted lady' type touches. As the front door is located on this side, I feel it is the front of the house, so deserves a bit of bling.  I had a bag of 1/24th scale shingles left over from the Fairfield kit, and thought I could do something simple with those.  I've seen a lot of fishscale shingle decoration on wooden houses in my travels.  Unfortunately my shingles are all different widths, so I had to create a temporary panel on a piece of card, sticking the rows down with doublesided tape, to work out a motif that looked right to the eye.  Then I disassembled the panel into separate rows that I could paint, before reassembling it on the actual house.  I'm considering painting the front door in the purple colour to tie it all in.

I'm ready to assemble and glue on the porch pieces now.

Windows and siding

 With the blue paint sorted out, I could glue on the exterior window frames.  Annoyingly, the curved hoods require the side pieces to overlap the window openings in order to meet properly, instead of lining up with the opening.  So the actual house wall will be recessed between the interior and exterior frames, which means I need to paint the inside edges of the frames a little as they will show.  A job for the future.

Siding

With the windows in place, I could think about where I wanted to place the siding.  First of all, I glued on the kitchen bay roof.  It turns out that the roof pieces rest on the window hoods in two places, so you definitely need to glue the window trim on first. I also found that I had some pretty big gaps between my three roof pieces, and between them and the wall, so I filled those in with some narrow strip wood.

I finished the 'basement' area with some brick paper, and added a strip of painted wood as a dividing line.

 I'm using some Greenleaf siding strips left over from the Willowcrest house kit - a sort of rough thin wood which is probably the same stuff they cut shingles from.  But it cuts quite easily.  I've drawn lines 5/8th of an inch apart in the areas where I want clapboard, and I'm gluing the siding on with UHU.  I'm butting the strips up to the bay roof pieces.  On the front narrow edge, I glued the narrow pieces on first for each row, then cut the adjoining kitchen bay piece at a slight angle to meet closely in the corner, before proceeding to the next row. 

For now, I have left the bay window corners exposed, planning to touch up with paint when I'm finished.   When I did the Willowcrest, I mitred all the bay corner siding (pic below)

But I think with the less realistic Mckinley, I will just leave it exposed (and touched up with blue paint).

On the front door/tower side of the house, I will aim to doing something a bit fancier, perhaps with some coloured fishtail shingles as accents.

Meanwhile I am toiling through the sanding/filling/painting cycle of finishing the porch pieces ready to install once the porch exterior wall is finished.

Still prepping exterior, dry fit of porch

 I gave up pretending to myself that if I just painted on sufficient blue paint, that the exterior painted surfaces would look better. So instead I painted them with gesso to fill in the grain and small gaps, and applied some filler on the larger gaps and splintered areas. Once that was sanded down, then it was back to applying coats of blue paint.  It's looking a lot better now and I've also painted three coats onto some siding planks left over from when I built the Willowcrest, to use as clapboard. 

I'm going to attempt a restrained 'painted lady' exterior treatment so I've swatched three pink acrylic colours to see what they look like when dry.  I'm wondering about adding some fishscale shingled areas for visual interest.

Porch

The exterior treatment on the porch side needs to take into account the porch and its roof fitting on properly.  So I started locating and punching out the porch pieces as mentioned in the confusing and inadequately illustrated instructions.  Several of the narrower trim pieces literally fell apart as I punched them out: some of the crappy plywood sheets seem to have a front and back skin of decent wood sandwiched around nothing but dark brown wood gravel.  I've patched them back together with copious amounts of wood glue.

Then I worked my way through the instructions, referring to the box lid, to try to figure out where the various porch pieces go.  My longer piece of roof trim is about an inch too short and the front side roof trim piece is non-existent, so I've cut some of my own stripwood for that purpose.  I didn't like how the front and rear column have the rough end grain on show, so I've cut some more stripwood to cover those up on the side elevation.

Once I figured out what went where, and which surfaces need to be painted, I sprayed it all with sealer in preparation for the filling/sanding/priming/painting cycle to begin anew.

Cutting cornice trim - and other trim issues

 I seem to be spending hours on this house with not much to show for it so far.  The window trim is finally ready, after handling each individual piece six times: filler, sanding, primer, sanding, and two coats of emulsion.  However when I went to try it out on the windows, I discovered a few things:

- I hadn't realised when apportioning window trim that the middle kitchen bay window is actually wider than the two flanking windows.  This means I was short one wider hood trim and a wider windowsill.  I had a wider hood in the unpainted spares pile, but I've had to cut out a new wider windowsill (because I thought I had one extra, and had already cut it down to make up the missing narrow windowsill, sigh).  So I've had to start again with the filler etc. on those two pieces.

- the pre-cut oval trim that I have prepared for the oval tower window openings, as it turns out, is not the same size as the openings punched in the house.  Luckily it was actually bigger, not smaller.  So I've had to break out the Dremel multitool and carve all three tower window openings to individually fit the trim pieces (which are not all exactly the same size either).

- dryfitting the trim to the windows, I confirmed that the exposed  exterior around the windows is going to be very slim - too slim to apply siding in the gap.  So I think it will just have to be a painted finish around the windows.  To that end, I've glued in some square strip wood to finish the grooves between the tower and bay side pieces and have started applying exterior colour.  I love the blue colour I've chosen, which is a Johnstone's tester pot, but the paint is incredibly thin.  I've done about five coats so far and it still looks terrible.  Also the grooves weren't all at the same angle or depth, so the strip wood trim is not uniform. Hopefully once it's all finished, it won't be very noticeable.

Cornice Trim

In between dealing with window trim, I've been preparing other trims such as the cornice and skirting boards.  I cut and installed skirting in all the first floor rooms, so it was time to deal with the cornice.  I had bought two different types: a fairly wide, flat trim for the ground floor 'best' rooms, and a more conventional triangular moulding for the first floor rooms.

I tackled the dining room first, with the flatter trim, to get warmed up.  That was fairly straightforward to miter the corners. 

I can't do the living room yet because it will have a built-in fireplace/staircase wall, so next was the study on the first floor.  The triangular moulding is not symetrical so it has a definite 'up' that always has to face upwards. I haven't cut moulding for a long time so it took me three or four bad cuts before I worked out the complexities of cutting the correct 45-degree angle when I'm right-handed so can only hold it into the miterbox with my left hand.  I tried my chop saw, which can be set to a 45 degree cut, but it wasn't wide enough or deep enough.  My razor saw only cuts on the pull, so it's a bit laborious to make the cuts.

The method was to mark the 'ceiling' side of the moulding with a long wiggly pencil line, and always cut with that side downwards in the mitre box.  Then whether it is an inward corner, or outward corner, has to be roughly marked in pencil so the correct slot can be chosen where I can still hold the moulding with my left hand.  Got there in the end, though the bedroom with its more complex cuts, did end up with some minor gaps which I've had to fill with a little decorators caulk.

Study, which is pretty much finished now

Hallway (finished)

Bedroom - there will be carpet on the floor but I'll 

leave that out until the end so it doesn't get damaged.

I decided life and skill was too short to attempt cornicing up inside the bay window, so I've just applied some narrow trim from my stash to cover the gap at the top of the walls.