The Beacon Hill part 7

Work is still going ahead on the dollhouse, but progress has been extremely slow the last several weeks. Here's a slightly old shot of the whole house - since then I've done a bit more work on the interior and I've started the exterior as well. Yes that is a taxidermied duckling, his name is Sir Frances Drake.

Look! Stuff is happening!

Click the jump for the sad shitty stuff.

The Beacon Hill part 6

I've gotten a lot done on the dollhouse in the last couple of weeks! I've installed the floor in the library, which is the biggest room in the house so that's an accomplishment! Now there are only six rooms left to be floored, so I'm a third of the way done with the popsicle sticks. I got the staircase mostly done, and the last touches are waiting until the floor is installed on the third floor.

Dry-fitting the floor.

The floor had to go into the library in two separate pieces to go around the staircase, but the installation went pretty smoothly. I wasn't careful enough in selecting flat, un-warped popsicle sticks, so it took a lot of sanding to get it looking smooth and flat. I messed up the varnish a little bit when I was installing the tower wall, so I need to go back and re-sand and re-varnish a few chunks of the floor, which is annoying, but luckily at least I messed it up in areas that are still accessible, so I can fix it. It would have been really frustrating to know that there were fingerprints in the finish forever!

Floor installed, finishing up the second floor staircase.

I had to do some creative clamping to keep all the pieces in place on the staircase. In the above photo you can see some gaps in the wallpaper - there are going to be some built-in staircases that will block off the area and I didn't feel like wasting the paper. I'm not sure how far I want the book-cases to extend, I may end up blocking off a window. This photo shows the color of the floor really nicely, I'm going to do the same process for every room in the house. It's time-consuming, but I really love the final effect, and I've always wanted a house with hardwood flooring in every room. Some day I will escape the awful shag carpeting that plagues me in our current apartment.

Tower wall, third floor walls, and roof supports.

Getting the staircase on the second floor done was the last obstacle before continuing on with structure. I've gotten the tower front wall on, which took a couple of days of gluing a bit at a time because I only have one giant clamp and four littler clamps that work for this purpose. Awesomely, I managed to fix some of the warping problems during this process, though there are still some awkward gaps. After the long slow process of getting that tower front wall up, the third floor walls and roof supports only took an afternoon, which was a pleasant surprise.

Wallpaper on the third floor.

When dry fitting the pieces, I discovered that if I wanted to finish the third-floor fireplace in any kind of way I needed to do it before assembling the roof and chimney, and I had to do the wallpaper first. I've been stalling on purchasing the paper for this room because I haven't found anything in the dark teal or dark blue range that I liked and I had my heart set on blue for this room. Needing to get it done quickly gave me the impetus to just choose something, so I ended up going with this dusty rose with gold, which is pretty awesome. I'm still looking for something blue or green for the bottom floor living room, and I'm undecided about what the upper left room will be. I have some more time before I need to paper those rooms, though.

Egg-carton stone brick fireplace.

I saw somewhere people recommending egg-carton for dollhouse scale stonework, and I have to say I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to do and how good it ended up looking! I'll take a better photos of everything once the whole house is put together, but for now you can see that I blacked out the inside of the fireplace to give the appearance of many years of fires. It's less black in person, but it's in a weird corner and no-one is ever really likely to stare inside of it. The mantle hasn't been finished yet, but I'm waiting until I have a bigger pile of things that need to be stained before I break out the gloves and stain again. For now it's just sitting in the slot on the wall.

Bathroom wallpaper.

While the glue was drying on the roof, I wallpapered the bathroom on the second floor. I cut up a vintage-look map print of San Francisco, and there's a dark green handmade canvas-y paper on the ceiling. This room will have some stained wood trim running vertically through the room, separating the map into panels.

The Beacon Hill part 5

These next few steps are going to be the most time consuming in the entire dollhouse-building process, I think, because I'm individually placing coffee stirrers and popsicle sticks for wainscotting and floorboards and they all have to be cut and sanded and it's a process. After poking around the internet and seeing how other people did it, I decided to go one step crazier and so this is the rough outline of how I'm assembling these pieces:

1) Create a paper template of the wall or floor I need to cover and trace it onto a piece of contact paper and a backing paper.

2) Cut enough coffee stirrers/popsicle sticks to cover the entire area, plus some extra.

3) Place the sticks onto the contact paper. I do this so that the "right" side of the wood is placed against the sticky side of the contact paper, and the "wrong" side is exposed.

4) Rough sand the wrong side of the wood.

5) Glue the backing paper to the wrong side of the wood.

6) Once dry, peel off the contact paper and sand the right side of the wood until smooth.

7) Stain, sand, stain, sand, varnish, sand, varnish.

8) Trim, then glue into place. Touch up varnish if necessary.

The hallway wainscotting in place.

I backed the wainscotting with tissue paper because I wanted it to be pretty flexible. Though it may sound delicate, between the PVA glue attaching it to the coffee stirrers and the polyurethane leaking between the boards it is surprisingly sturdy. I attached it to the walls with Yes Paste just like it was wallpaper. General dollhouse wisdom is to not use water-based glues with wood because it can cause it to warp (when attaching things like floors) but mostly they suggested hot glue which I hate and also it tends to be lumpy in application, so I just clamped everything really well and hoped for the best.

The hall floor after the final coat of varnish, and the crown molding and chair rail.

I then made the floor in the exact same manner, except that the popsicle sticks need to be sanded before they can be put onto the contact paper, because otherwise the gaps between boards would be just too noticeable. I used brown paper bag for the floor backing.

Beans! I walled them into the room with some tape, which worked surprisingly well.

After applying the floor (also with Yes paste, because damnit it works) I weighed it down with beans. While not super heavy, this way I was able to evenly apply a couple pounds of pressure accross the whole floor surface, which meant a nice smooth finish.

The almost completed hallway!

So here is the hallway on the bottom floor, almost finished! You can see the crown molding and the chair rail. All it needs now is some touch up on the stairway finish, a door in that closet, some more trim on the stairway, baseboards, and door frames. The back wall is not yet attached, but it is also mostly finished and as soon as I get the floor in on the library on the second floor I can glue that in as well.

Cutting and laying out popsicle sticks on my library floor template.

So now I am slowly cutting and sanding all the boards for the library. I combined two rooms here, so this room is by far the largest and will take more time than any other. Once this floor is in, I can put the final touches on the stairway and attach the tower wall. Then I'm going to take a brief break from floors and work on getting some more house structure in place. I'm hoping to get the bulk of the construction done before I start my new job at the end of the month, so it can take up less space while I'm not working on it as much.

Even though I'll have less time for the dollhouse, I suspect things will also move a little bit faster after this point, because the most fiddly bits are largly completed. The roof will be a lot of work, but hopefully I'll get that done next week. Minus the shingles, which I can do at some point in the future.

The Beacon Hill part 4

Having decided to just get on with it and wallpaper all the rooms, I am pretty glad that I did. The paper is more expensive than I would like, but the result looks a whole lot better, so I'll run with it. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the process is pretty easy and way less messy than I expected. I'm using Yes Paste for my adhesive rather than wallpaper mucilage, and I have a little plastic palette knife that makes spreading a thin even layer of glue way easier than a brush. Yes Paste doesn't grab and hold immediately, so I've been spreading the glue on each paper sheet, washing my hands, picking up the paper and placing it lightly on the wall, washing my hands, then smoothing it into place. I'm pretty impressed with how easy and clean the installation has been so far! So at least one thing is going right.

Starting wallpaper installation on the first and second floors.

The wallpaper needed to be in place before I could install the staircase, so I focused on the middle rooms on the first and second floors first. All the other rooms can be wallpapered later, but these two had to be done before I could go any further. The wallpaper covered the massive damage to the wall beautifully, but I am putting in baseboards in that room so only half of the wall is covered so far. I'll post a better photo when that process is done.

Both staircases assembled and sanded.

I didn't take a lot of photos during the staircase construction and installation. Construction was really easy and I was done way sooner than I expected, and installation was... interesting. I'm not really sure how this happened, but the staircase for the bottom floor ended up a good 3/16" of an inch too large in EVERY DIRECTION. Not only did I have to trim off all of the tabs, but I also needed to hack and sand pieces off of pretty much every part of the staircase. In addition, I just could not get the top lined up properly with the slots on the second floor, so I had to cut the bannister trim piece off and install it separately from the second floor. Several decorative bits just didn't fit at all and had to be cut off, so now I need to replace them with whole new fiddly bits of wood.

The giant clamp holding the staircase in place delivers 300 lbs of pressure, which the Dictionary of Numbers informs me is the weight of an adult female lion.

Despite not working at all, installing the staircase still went fairly quickly. Here everything is clamped in place to cure for a couple of days. Using the giant new clamp my husband bought me, I was able to fix a few of the warping issues I had with the walls. I chiseled out all the old glue and used a glue syringe to place new glue, and the clamp managed to keep everything together! The left rooms on the first and second floor look much better now. 

The Beacon Hill Part 3*

Well, this kit sure is made of terrible, terrible wood. 

I managed to get the main body pieces of the dollhouse sanded, painted, and finally assembled, but the process was a lot more frustrating than I would have hoped.

(My father in law, who is a crazy amazing carpenter who specializes in cabinets and marquetry and fancy arts and crafts furniture, seems personally offended that I did not ask him to help me build a dollhouse from scratch. I wanted to do something that would fill up my time at home and not require interaction with others, but now I need to come up with a wood working project to do with him.)

Partially completed dollhouse, which is currently doubling as shelves.

The sheets of wood are pretty severely warped. I tried correcting the warp with a ton of glue and clamps and weights, but that yellow-grey-magenta wall is just too curved. (This is also the worst culprit for crumbling ply.) My current plan is to get more of the frame together and start shoving coffee stirrers and wood filler into any gaps. I was going to put in baseboards and crown molding for looks, but I also need them for stability.

This wall is the worst culprit. I'm thinking about leaving it this way.

I wanted to paint the whole thing to avoid the trouble of pasting in paper as well as the expense of paper and paste and the extra time it would add, but now I'm seriously reconsidering wallpaper. Big chunks of one of the walls just kind of fell off during assembly, and I just don't know if I want to go through the trouble of wood filling (again) and sanding (again) and painting (again) now that the walls are attached. One entire sheet of plywood is so bad that huge chunks just kind of peel away. It almost seems like whatever adhesive was used in the manufacturing of the plywood is just... gone. Luckily there weren't too many pieces cut out of this sheet, but unluckily those pieces include two of the major walls.

Wallpaper would cover those missing chunks nicely, and also conceal the weird patching I'm going to have to do to make up for the gaps due to warped walls.

Partially completed first floor staircase.

To buy myself some time to think about the wallpaper issue, I've started working on the staircase, which is next up in the instructions anyway. I got the first floor main structure all taped together while it dries, and I started thinking about how much room that staircase takes up in the bottom floor. And how that big staircase support is just hollow. And how there could be a creepy little cabinet under the stairs really easily. 

This is when I took a moment to rip a hole into my already assembled staircase.

Surprisingly, cutting a big rectangle into the staircase went really quickly and smoothly, despite not really having the right tools to do it and the pieces being awkwardly half glued together and still attached with blue tape. I used my handy dremel stylus to drill holes in the corners of where I wanted the opening, and then I sort of wore the cut lines in with the metal grinder attachment, which really wasn't intended for that purpose. It only took a couple minutes, and I had a big ugly hole in my staircase!

The bannister/trim piece completely covers my hack job!

The weird bannister/trim piece that goes on this side of the staircase had a big rectangular hole in it for decorative purposes, which is what gave me the idea in the first place. It covers any unfortunate scorch marks from the dremel and gives me a nice smooth door frame for my under-stair cupboard. Now all it needs is a little door and an abused wizard child.

*I dropped the days and I'm going with parts because there is no way this is going to go quickly. The Greenleaf website says that it will take an estimated 50 hours to complete their kit, but I would be optimistic in estimating a mere 200. Every step of the way requires a good deal of swearing, gluing broken bits back together, and wood filler.

The Beacon Hill Dollhouse days 2-5

I don't know if this applies to all Greenleaf dollhouse kits, but what I've read on the internet seems to imply that it does - the plywood in this kit is super terrible. It delaminates pretty constantly, and even extremely light sanding can pull off huge strips of wood. Most of my life the past few days has been spent sanding, wood-filling, sanding, getting the pieces for the second step of assembly ready to be painted. (These pieces are true majority of the large pieces of dollhouse, but not all of them, so next week will be more of the same!)

The right partition wall hates me a lot.

This piece was by far the worst. The wood is so crappy that I couldn't glue these big chunks in, and part of the door broke off during sanding. I'm going to attempt to glue it back in place AFTER I've put the rest of the house together, so that it doesn't get broken during assembly again. The wood filler is very exciting, it starts out a crazy neon purple and starts changing color to white almost immediately when exposed to the air, and dries very quickly. Much nicer to work with than the brown stuff of my youth.

Even with primer, the different shades of wood are clearly visible.

Here are all the pieces sanded, primed, ready to be painted. I'm painting them before assembly because I don't want to deal with shoving a paint brush into tight corners if I don't have to.

IT WILL BE BEAUTIFUL, I SWEAR

After a lot of thought, I opted to go with paint and not wallpaper because wallpapering looks hard and will cost me several dollars a room, whereas painting is... less... hard? And costs me about a dollar a room. Most importantly, wallpapering would require waiting until I could find the perfect prints for OMG 9 rooms and that's just insane. And I've started painting! Right now the colors all look terrible and wrong but one everything is assembled and trimmed and aged it will come together and look amazing. At least that's what I'm telling myself.

On the plus side, if I hate the paint once I get this next step actually assembled it isn't too late to re-paint or change my mind instead and go with wallpaper. I have until I actually install the stairs to change my mind, but I won't need to because the paint is going to look great.

The Beacon Hill Dollhouse Day 1

Well, it sure has been a long time since I used this blog!  But since I've decided to make a ridiculously large and complex dollhouse to fulfill all my girlhood dreams of property ownership, this seemed like a good time to dust it off. 

I'm building the Beacon Hill Dollhouse by Greanleaf Dollhouses. Ideally, it will look like the photo below when it's finished... except that I am me, and it is going to look spoopily old and run-down and possibly abandoned/haunted. Weathering and distressing the house will have the lovely side effect of covering any mistakes I make! 

The Beacon Hill Dollhouse Kit, Greenleaf Dollhouses

I've started the assembly of the first floor of the dollhouse, and by "start" I mean I managed to get it mostly punched out. You see, the very first sheet of my kit was only partially die-cut, so that the cuts go maybe halfway through the ply, making it pretty impossible to actually punch these pieces from the sheet. I spent a pretty frustrating hour finagling the floor out of the sheet with a hand saw, when I realized it was like 10:30pm and I probably shouldn't be using a power drill next to my landlord's bedroom. 

I could (probably should?) see if Greenleaf will send me a replacement sheet, and I've heard they are pretty good about that sort of thing, but there's something viscerally satisfying about doing this the most pig-headed and difficult way possible, so I'm going to keep on keeping on.

Failboat Dollhousing 101

Following my husband's brilliant suggestion, I'm using the bottom half of the shipping box as a work-surface/tray to keep the house in. I know I won't be able to do everything inside this box, but it will make putting everything aside at night a lot easier.

Wood bits organized "neatly" in cardboard boxes

Similarly, I have all the sheets corralled in these cardboard boxes, with the sheet number labeled on the edge in painters tape so I can glance at the tops on the sheets and find the one I'm looking for. Pieces that fall out of the sheet get labeled with what they are and what sheet they come from and thrown into the box on the right. As these build up I will start shoving them in labelled ziplock bags, but for now there are only a couple of them.

I'm off to go buy blades for my jewelry saw, because I can't get all those pesky tabs out of the floor with a craft knife, though I tried pretty hard.

Handmade Floral Crown from Vintage Book Pages

EDIT: Apparently I saved this draft in 2012 and never posted it? I'm not sure where I was going with this, so I'm just posting it in all of its unfinished glory. 

O HAI

This past weekend I spent in a sort of crazed daze making lots and lots of tiny paper roses, which I then wove into this awesome paper crown, as you do.  I was inspired by this DIY from 100 Layer Cake, but I chose to make my roses (really a lot) smaller.  Having recently seen a bunch of DIY's for floral crowns around the internets lately, I smashed the two things together into a floral crown that will last a bit longer than a few hours.

Here's a closeup of the individual roses, of which there are many.

I think this would be a really pretty crown to wear

Here you can see my ingenious use of glue and floral tape!