Step D (porch) and modifying Step E (tower), decisions re step F (roof)

 Step D porch

I followed the instructions to construct the porch assembly using my pre-painted pieces.  With the porch floor in place, I could start dry-fitting the tower pieces.

Step E Tower modifications

I finished prepping the tower pieces by filling the edges of the window cut-outs and sanding smooth.  Then I could do a dry fit of the tower pieces. I found the sides of the bays only went in one way, they weren't interchangeable in terms of tabs fitting into slots.  They are also a little taller than the other pieces which is intentional according to Step E:5.

I have never liked how the tower walls cut down into the attic room.  It's ugly, and unrealistic, yet I haven't found anyone online who has modified the design to eliminate the interior support walls. I punched out the roof pieces so I could get an idea of how it all worked.

No house would look like this on the inside:

It seemed like there were two choices: either cut the tower sides off in line with the roofline, or, build additional interior walls to block off the under-eave space and turn the tower into a sort of dormer.  I decided to go with cutting off the tower sides.  I'm not even sure they will need additional support because the shorter pieces will be glued into the tower structure and into the roof, and they only need to support the tower roof which won't be that heavy.  But it may need some reinforcement so external pressure (say, applying shingles) on the roof, doesn't pop the glue joint, I'll have to think about how to do that.

The new tower shape:

With the modifications made, I have started on the steps of E to glue the tower pieces into place.  I've had a look at a few other blogs, I might try decorating the tower with siding and shingle bands.

Step F Roof

As stated above, I punched out the roof pieces to dry fit them around the tower. But also to understand how the space works, because I haven't found any clear pictures online of how the roof works, how the two spaces connect, or what the roofline looks like from above.  As it turns out, the two roof spaces not only connect, the passage is high enough for my scale doll to stand up in. So I think I'm good to add an interior wall and turn the smaller roof into an ensuite.  Because even though I already have a bedroom all planned out for the first floor, the big attic space with tower is just begging to be a master suite.  Maybe the first floor can be the guest room. Of course, there will be no obvious way to access the attic floor, I think it has to be an imaginary staircase in the part of the house that has been cut off the reveal the interior.  

The roof pieces fit together fairly well apart from one misaligned slot on the Right Large Roof.

Here are some pics of the roof interior and exterior.  You're welcome.

The connecting passage

The two roof spaces

The complex roofline with three roof ridges and tower

So I've put the roof pieces to one side until I get the tower built.  I need to think about a decoration scheme because the attic will  be a complex space to apply wallpaper to, it might be better to do something before the roof is glued on.

More on StepS C:7-8, prep for Step D

 Trudging on with construction.  

I realised that I could see the other side of the false hallway as well, so I've painted that black and tidied up the join with a black strip.  I've neatened the opposite corner with a hardwood strip. 

view into false hall from above

While I still had access, I took a template of the hallway floor for future flooring installation.

All the wasted space behind the false wall over the 'stairs' was bugging me, you wouldn't do that in a real house. So I bodged in half a shelf that I've had for years, there is a little drawer at the bottom - it can be a knicknack or bookshelf in the bedroom.  I also added a wood strip to the inside of the main false wall to give a bit more gluing surface - I don't want the wall to come free when I press on it to apply wallpaper.

Once the bedroom wall assembly dried, I glued it into the main house (Step C:8)

Once all that dried, I put the house on its front and smeared more wood glue into all the crevices around slots and the gaps between pieces on the back and base, hoping to add more strength.  Part of me is still worried that the front of the house will fall off under its own weight once the house is hung on the wall.  While I've got access, I've filled over the slots in the base and will give it a few coats of emulsion.

Step D - porch

I am probably going to decorate the outside of the house quite similarly to the box picture, so I prepped the back wall of the porch for painting along with the stairs, risers, and the porch front - by smearing filler into the endgrain, then sanding when dry. Then I gave them 3 coats of white emulsion.  I've stained the porch floor in Dark Oak after drawing in false floorboards with a Pigma micron pen and belatedly realised that I drew the boards the way you would build a porch, which unfortunately is counter to the natural grain, so it looks stupid.  Luckily most of the porch floor will be hidden.  After the stain dried, I gave it a coat of matt varnish. I've painted the porch front end piece black, because it looks like this will be covered with white trellis.

Step E - Tower - prep

I've punched out the various tower pieces and sprayed them with sealer. I feel a bit stressed about the tower because it is one of the main features of the house, and yet the out-of-the-box design looks pretty naff.  Not sure what I'm going to do.  It would be tricky to cover it with siding due to the angles, but equally tricky to try to get a smooth paint finish.

Finally some gluing - Steps C: 2-8

 Finally some gluing - but first more prep work, sigh.

I sanded down the gesso to smooth the pieces - kind of regretting painting all the surfaces now, it would have saved effort if I had worked out which surfaces were likely to be covered up (like floors).

Then I did a preliminary dry fit to check if the tabs were going into the slots - a lot of them weren't.  As usual, some of the slots were too short, or too narrow, or the tabs were too long or slightly mis-positioned.  So I had to widen some of the slots and trim down some of the tabs.

Having identified which surfaces were going to be ceilings (undersides of the 2nd and third floors), I gave them two coats of white emulsion paint.  All's that did was highlight two dents in the wood I had missed, and also reveal how much grain was still visible.  So more gesso, more filler, and more sanding, and then three coats of emulsion (the last with a roller).  I used quarter-inch quilters masking tape to mask off the places that have to glue to other pieces.  My palm sander died partway through the sanding - I checked and I've had it since 2007 so it had a good innings.  Surprisingly, the price had only gone up by £1 in all that time, so I ordered another which arrived the next day.

Another prep job was to apply filler to openings where the edges are likely to remain on show: the false hall doorway, the study doorway, and the openings in the right and left wall - and then sand them so they are smoother.  This is what makes it all tricky: trying to think ahead to get jobs done while things are accessible.

The false hallway is going to be closed off once constructed, so I applied some wallpaper to the back wall of it, and also onto the side wall because with my wider doorways, the side may be visible.

For the same reason, I glued some wood strips on the hidden side of the doorway, so that it looks like door architrave from the viewing side.

Then I could finally start gluing!  It makes me laugh that the box says 'easily assembled with glue' when it is anything but easy.  Inserting some tabs into slots makes it harder to insert others, the lack of precision engendered by the rough wood leads to small inaccuracies which add up to tabs slightly missing their slots or surfaces not meeting properly....  let's just say you need a lot of clamps, many hands and much patience.  I'm using Gorilla woodglue.

The initial construction is attached to the back, and then the right and left walls are glued on.

The base is glued on together with the living room floor support

 - then the bedroom wall and false hall entrance

The next step will be assembling the porch base, which will already force me to make some decisions on external decoration. I've punched out the various pieces and have spray sealed the ones that will be painted.

Some of the wallpaper that I ordered, the stuff from Minimum World, has arrived. I am relieved to find that I like it. It's a bit of a gamble ordering from online in terms of accurate colours.  I'm not much of a decorator but I think I'm going to go for an Arts and Crafts feel.

More prelim and some modifications

 With the glue dry on the back wall seam, I applied some wood filler to fill the gap, because I think the join will be visible across the back of the rooms (depending on what covering I decide to use).

I'm going to add a proper window to the 'bathroom' area (which may become a study) - I have a House of Miniatures kit for a wooden sash window in my stash.  It made sense to align the new window with the kitchen bay, so I punched out the pieces for the kitchen bay roof to check that it wouldn't interfere with the new cut-out.  I cut a new window opening with a Stanley knife and metal safety ruler, which was hard work.  I filled in the remaining bathroom window by gluing the punched-out piece back into place (always save all your scraps with these kits).

I also cut the door openings wider in the central wall, to the size that will accept a standard commercial door (although I probably will leave the archway open on the ground floor.  To cut these, I got out the electric jigsaw for the main cuts and then finessed with the Stanley knife, which was easier than trying to do it all with a knife.  I realised later that I had forgotten to widen the door opening in the bedroom wall so I still have to do that.

Then it was time to start priming - I still have some artist's gesso left over from previous kits so I used that.  I paint it across the grain, so that it fills the grain a little.  I try to avoid getting it into the slots, and I try to avoid painting the tabs.  After the gesso dries, I will sand everything smooth with a palm sander.  It creates a good surface for subsequent painting, or wallpapering. I suppose technically I don't need to prime surfaces that will be covered by cladding or flooring, but at this point it's just easier to paint everything.  The white also shows up a lot of the flaws and pinholes in the wood, so I can fill them later if I need to.

The weights are holding down an extension piece that I glued onto the false bedroom wall - I added a 1 1/8" scrap of plywood from my stash leftover from building previous Greenleaf kits. The wider wall will give a little more room around the bed.

Preliminary work

 I punched out the main pieces for the house - which sounds easy but isn't.  The die-cut often hasn't cut completely through, and punching out is a cautious, splintery process where you try to identify the problem cuts and improve them with a craft knife before applying pressure. I still shredded the wood in a few places, although I was able to repair the worst patch with some wood glue and a clamp to hold the shreds back down.

Then I gave the pieces a light sanding around the edges of the cuts, to knock off more splinters. I use a disposable nail file to sand inside the slots. I've written on pieces of masking tape to temporarily label the house pieces. Then I did a dry fit of the main house pieces held together with masking tape, to get a sense of the room sizes and what I might want to change. I found that the slots on the first and second floors, that should intersect the centre wall, weren't completely cut through.  The instructions don't mention this, but I had to complete the slots with a craft knife and safety ruler. The plywood is easy to cut because it's so thin and rubbish.

I was pleasantly surprised at how big the rooms in the house are: reasonably deep, and the ceilings are high.  I can see right away that the doorways are ridiculously skinny, so those need to be widened.  There are no internal doors supplied with the kit, I have a commercial one but it will be too deep for the thin wood, will have to think about that.  Overall, there are far fewer pieces to this kit than the Greenleaf Willowcrest.

I had a dig through my large stash of furniture bits to see what might fit into the house.  The bedroom is easy, I have a vintage wicker set I got in an estate sale which will work nicely.  I will lengthen the false wall in the bedroom to give a bit more room around the bed.

I'm not sure that I want to do a kitchen and bathroom, I've done them before in other houses, and kitchens in  particular require so much accessorising.  I'm thinking about turning the ground floor room into a dining room instead, and the first floor room could be a study.  But then I will need to insert a bigger window for the study, if I can fit one next to the kitchen bay window roof.  Although I do have a cute little ceramic bathroom set, which might fit into the smaller attic room (although that room will be tiny).

I have to admit to a huge fit of 'I can't do this' when I was contemplating the decorating.  I don't want to just furnish the house so it's complete, I want something that makes my heart sing when I look at it. But that means lots of decisions about wallpaper, paint schemes etc. which make my heart sink instead.  I'm much better when I have a picture to copy.  I've had a look online at possible exterior paint schemes.

As a first stage of prepping the wood, I took the main pieces outside and sprayed them with clear laquer on both sides to seal them.  This used up a full 400ml spray can plus a bit of another one.  It was cheaper to buy laquer than something labelled 'sealer'.

Then I could glue together the two pieces that make up the back of the house.  I use Gorilla wood glue for house construction because it makes a much stronger joint than tacky glue.  The jars etc. are just heavy things to weight down the seam while it dries, so it stays flat.  The back won't be that strong by itself but all the houses pieces are going to intersect with it, so that will give an overall rigidity. 

Getting started

 

What am I building?

The McKinley is a shallow wall-hung dollshouse from the American company Greenleaf. It measures approximately 31" high by 31" wide but only 9" deep when completed.  It's their typical older model house, die-cut from poor quality thin plywood, and assembled via tab-and-slot construction (newer kits are cut from better plywood, or even laser-cut).  I had been admiring the house in Greenleaf advertisements for decades, and decided to go for it  in 2011 when Greenleaf had a 25% off sale.  They shipped it to the UK to me.  And there it sat in a closet for a few years until we moved house in 2013.  Then it sat in the new house for another 10 years.

About me

I am a lapsed miniaturist, but I still have a lot of dollshouses that I built and/or decorated back in the day.  I have built three Greenleaf kits in the past: a Fairfield which was a disaster because I had no idea what I was doing, then a Willowcrest which I turned into a craft store, and finally another Fairfield which I kit-bashed into a Carpenter Gothic. So I have some familiarity with the Greenleaf construction and dealing with their rubbish plywood.  I've always enjoyed the build more than the interior decoration - I like following instructions and interiors just require too much original thought and decisionmaking.

The last 10 years I haven't done much with miniatures except for building a part-work 1:20 Japanese ryokan, and putting together some of the Chinese kits from Ro-life. I don't think I've been to a dollshouse show since before COVID, there is no local DH club, and I no longer subscribe to a DH magazine.  So I'm pretty out of touch with the current state of the hobby apart from enjoying the surprising development of television reality competitions based on miniatures.  But I'm retired now, and I'm trying to tackle some of the older items on the 'to do' list before I get too old.  So I'm going to have a go at the McKinley.

Getting started

My dollshouse room is very crowded, so before I could even open the McKinley box, I had to make some room.  I've moved a few houses upstairs, put away a lot of miscellaneous bits lying around, and I bought an old Victorian dining table for 20 quid on Facebook Marketplace to use as a work table. It was missing its leaves so I popped in a bit of scrap wood to gain some more work surface.  I've also had a look at the Greenleaf forum at some McKinleys, and had a look on Youtube where there are some videos of construction and modifications - as well as cautionary pointers on what areas need to be finished before they get closed off permanently during construction.

Then I could open the box and take out the sheets of what passes for wood, and do an inventory.  Luckily all sheets are accounted for, nothing seems to be missing.  Several sheets are a little warped but not too badly, possibly because the kit has been standing against the wall for several years so they may have literally sagged under their own weight.

I've ordered some spray sealer from Amazon, and DH gave me a lift to the DIY store to pick up some filler, caulking, masking tape and wallpaper paste.  Not that I have much in the way of wallpaper  (do people still buy that, or is it 'print your own' nowadays?).  So I should be ready to start punching out the main pieces and doing a test dry fit with masking tape so I can look at the layout and see if I want to change anything.