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.