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.