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.