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.