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.