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.

Yet more trim, and the mysteries of Sheet 19

 Not much to report as I am bogged down in finishing trim.  I prepared the cornicing for the house and also stained the newly arrived skirting board and dado rail.  And I painted some wood 'beams' in preparation for applying them to the attic ceiling.

I had been putting off the horrors of the window trim from the kit, but I need to get it onto the house before I can tackle the exterior finishes.  In addition to the 18 sheets of crappy diecut plywood in the kit, there are two extra sheets in better plywood numbered 19, and a paper note explaining that all the trim for the windows has been moved from the older sheets onto the new sheet 19s, apart from the exterior window trim.  There is a layout diagram for sheet 19, but it is unlabeled.  

Also, despite the new sheet 19s, there are still a lot of older window trim pieces  on the old sheets, and these are labelled on the schematics.  So I punched out all of the pieces from the two sheet 19s and used the schematic labels to try to work out what went where.  I ended up having to trace off the various window outlines from the house, so I could compare trim pieces to the contours to match up the various location pieces.  Somehow I was still short by one external tower  bay window hood and one external tower bay sill.  I had an extra sill for the bedroom window for some reason so I cut that down to be the right size for the tower.  For the hood, I traced off another one onto some scrap plywood and cut it out on my fretsaw.  I was also short of a couple of side trim pieces and internal sills so had to use some of the rotten pieces from the older sheets - literally delaminating as I punched them out so I had to glue them back together.

Finally I had dozens of trim pieces sorted out and could apply filler to all the edges.  Then that all needed to be sanded down and now I am applying the first coat of paint.  All very laborious, plus one of the side trim pieces had a hidden rotten spot and snapped in half as I was painting it. It would have looked better to stain the interior trim for some of the rooms, but I don't think this wood would look that great particularly the end grain, so I'm just going to paint it all.

Attic - flooring, skirting, wallpaper borders, applying centre roof and tower ceiling

Attic floor

 I'd bought some Victorian floor boards from Dolls House Mouldings and decided to use these in the attic.  I wanted a shabby chic effect as if the existing attic floor boards had been sanded and then whitewashed.  So I sprayed the boards grey, and then whitewashed them with white acrylic paint: wiping a dilute coat on, and then dry brushing for more streaks - finishing with matt spray varnish.  That turned out rather well, so I went ahead and fitted them to the attic.  Right away the room looked so much better, turning it from cheap plywood to a finished surface.

Attic skirting

With the floor in place, I could cut and apply the skirting.  The bay window was a bit tricky: by math, I think the angle should be 22.5 degrees but then this kit isn't that precise.  I found a big plastic protractor in my stash that I don't remember buying, but by clamping that to my sander, I could grind an approximate 20 degree angle which worked well enough.  I need to touch up the joints with some paint to make them look better.

Wallpaper border

Because of all the angles in the attic, I had to think where to apply border.  I knew I wanted to conceal the tops of my false walls.  I consulted with DH who thought that keeping the border horizontal was better than trying to run it at an angle.  So I ran it across the back of the room, level with the wall between the main room and the bathroom, along the tops of the false walls, around the top of the tower, and along the skirting in the bathroom. (the raw edges of the tower will be hidden by trim, and also the ceiling joins.

Applying centre roof and tower ceiling

With the bulk of the interior work done that needed access, I could glue on the tower ceiling (also visible in the picture above) and the centre roof insert (weighted down to keep the glue joints tighter).

Tower assembly, more decorating, defeated by a window kit

 The additional wallpaper showed up for the attic.  This is being custom printed on A4 paper by an etsy seller and you can choose landscape or portrait format.  Last time I went for portrait because I had the tall peak of the big attic room to cover.  This time I had asked for landscape, thinking that I would get more wallpaper for matching.  So I was perplexed when I was attempting to match the paper I cut for one of the false walls, with the existing paper on the tower, and it just would not match.  Comparison of the new sheets with the old sheets revealed that the scale on the new sheets is slightly different, and larger, than on the old sheets.  I will not be ordering custom print A4 wallpaper again in future, I don't think.  

Anyway, with the new wallpaper, I could go ahead and paper, then glue in, the false walls in the attic. I've boxed in the corner of the big room, and applied a narrow false wall to the side of the bathroom to hide the eaves.

Tower assembly

I cut a false ceiling for the tower roof from matboard, and decorated the right side of that with a print out of handpainted starry night sky.

For the tower assembly, I decided to keep the tower ceiling unglued and just use it to help hold the sides in place while their glue dried.  This involved lots of masking tape and clamps.  I glued in the back piece first that rests on the new false wall, so I could wrap the paper around the corner.

Then I added the other pieces in one by one.

    Once it was all dry, I could remove all the apparatus, and then take off the top of the tower which gave me a lot more access for working on the interior.  First I cut a very odd template for the remaining wallpaper, then glued the remaining paper into place.

The Tower roof back in place, but I won't glue it until I've applied the border and the inside window trim pieces.

The remaining attic roof pieces I am going to leave off for now, for better access until I've  applied a floor in the main room and the border and trim.  But it looks from pictures online like the smaller room is going to be quite closed in and dark. I've chosen not to electrify this house, because that's a time consuming and expensive job and I find with my other houses that have lighting, that I almost never put the lights on.  Partly because I'm terrified a bulb will go and will be impossible to replace, but mainly because it's a faff to plug the power supply in etc.  So to get a bit more light into the small room, I've cut out a skylight in the rear roof piece which I will cover with some of my new perspex set into a wooden frame. I considered putting a bigger skylight in the side roof, but this way the roofline and shingling won't be visually interrupted.

Decorating

I had stained the cases of  two pre-made doors, and then painted the doors themselves with white paint, trying not to get white paint onto the stained portions.  It wasn't until I was actually applying the door handles that I realised something wasn't quite right:  one door (probably the one I got on a de-stash table) was upside down compared to the other.  I'd managed at this point to apply stain, varnish, three coats of paint, and another of varnish without ever noticing that the two doors didn't match.  So then I had to break off the bottom of one door, and pull the door off of its pin hinges to flip it over.  I also glued on pre-stained wood strip inside the door frame so that the door sits away from the wall - splitting the thickness of the pre-made door evenly  across the skinny walls of the kit.  Then finally I could glue the doors into the wider holes I cut some weeks ago, and add the interior frames.

With doors in place, I could cut the skirting boards for the hall and study.  I quickly discovered that the Deep Victorian Skirting I had ordered from Dolls House Mouldings was too high for my miter box, making it impossible to cut a clean miter with my razor saw.  After screwing up a few cuts, I instead turned to my little belt sander and improvised a 45 degree guide from a quilting ruler.  This is working fairly well: it gives a clean miter with minimal effort and it's easy to fine tune the length if I don't get it quite right.  I am chopping the lengths using a cheap chop saw from Amazon.

I'm pleased with the finished effect.

I fought the window, and the window won

I had cut a wider opening in the study wall to accept an old House of Miniatures sash window kit that I got for £2.50 in a de-stash sale at some time in the dim past.  So I had stained the surround  of the pre-made frame, and carefully painted the interior grooves white. I had also painted all the sash window frame pieces white, being careful to apply very little paint so that I didn't get build up.  The plastic 'glass'that came with the kit had darkened to amber, so I ordered some replacement 1.5mm perspex from Hobbies which turned up yesterday. With some difficulty I cut replacement panes using a Stanley knife to match the original size of the kit panes.

I'd already had trouble attempting to glue the side sash frame pieces to their end pieces, because there is so little gluing surface, but after two attempts had managed it.  But when I tried to slide the replacement perspex into the grooves cut into the sash frames, they wouldn't go in at all.  Neither would the original panes. Partly due to paint buildup and raised wood grain, and partly due to the tiniest misalignment of the grooves when I glued the pieces together.  Not until I had sanded away most of the thin coat of paint, could I get the original pane to slide in and by then I had already broken one of the sashes again.  Doing a belated dry fit, I discovered that not only were the original 'glass' panes too short and left a gap, but also that the completed framed sash would not slide into the main frame.  Much sanding ensued before I could get the sash window to slide into the main frame, plus I had to cut two more replacement perspex 'glass' panes that were a bit taller (I found it much easier to cut these using my electric fret saw). By this point, all the glue joints had broken and it had become obvious that the tolerances of the kit were so small, that I was never going to be able to assemble a sash frame independently that had any hope of sliding into the main frame.

So I gave up on the idea of a working sash window and have glued the sash pieces directly into the main frame, adding the perspex and the top pieces and tweaking it all until it looks square and correct.  I will need to touch up the paint carefully.  And the windows are supposed to have tiny wooden mullions applied in a grid across the glass but I don't know if I can face those.