Just have a little more shingling to do, some detail work in the attic, the brickwork on the foundation and I'm done. I can sure see this dollhouse decorated for all the holidays! I can see red, white and blue striped banners draped on the front porch railing; I can see youngsters climbing out the upstairs windows and making their way to sit ontop of the little dormer roofs to look up at the starry sky; pumpkins and spider webs, orange glow and black scary silhouettes in the windo
I have started building the Dura Craft 505 Farmhouse. I have spent about 5 hours total so far. On the picture of the unpainted siding piece, can you find the replacement piece I had to fashion out of scrap wood for the piece that came up missing in the kit?
This is a series of 3 pictures, showing the assembly of the base supports. It took me a few minutes to figure out exactly what they wanted you to do so I thought I would save someone a little time by showing you what I finally figured out.
The first picture shows support pieces D on the left and E on the right, apart from each other. Support piece E has support piece B inserted at the end.
The second picture show support piece D on top of support E a
Man, it was hard to get the walls into the grooves of the side supports! It's going to be messy when there is glue applied! I'm hoping that holding it all together for a little while, dry, maybe if the walls were warped, it will force them into being straight and so gluing them in will be easier than dry fitting them in. We'll see. But the sunny yellow looks okay with the white trim. I've painted the foundation gray in preparation for the brick.
I realized (fortunately before glue was applied) that the underside of the base supports have a groove in them; the groove is to go over the splices in the first floor. Pretty nifty!
Started the painting of all the window pieces. Here you see the frames and sliders. White on the main part and baby blue (that you can't hardly see) on the very inside edge. The backsides (interior sides) will also be white. Note to newbies: do not paint the horizontal edges of these pieces. You will be inserting these pieces into a two channcel window frame. They need to be able to slide up and down (you are making working windows here). If you paint those horizontal edges,
Today I have finished all but one of the windows. All the window openings were about 1/4" too big! I had to shim each window! Fortunately, I had some scrap wood that was just the right size. I have never run into that problem before. I glued five of the walls in place. When I started to add the next wall, the others started coming undone so I stopped and clamped things together until tommorrow when the glue will be dry.
Just a FYI: when putting together the curved staircase on the Dura Craft 505 Farmhouse, make sure you dry fit the tread below the riser you have just glued in...so that what happened in this picture to me, doesn't happen to you...i.e. the curve of the riser does not match the curve of the tread. If you dry fit the tread in just after you have glued and taped in the riser, you still have time to manipulate the curve of the riser to match the tread. The directions, of course, don't
Wow. The porch roof went on without a hitch! Got half the roof shingled. I did three rows of shingles with the shingles that came with the kit but they were awful. So I scraped off the three rows and started over with some shingles I had saved from a previous project. The brick work on the chimney also turned out awful...this kit was laying around for some years so I'm wondering if the magic brik stuff deteriates over time? I've never had a problem with it before...bricking th
Found a two landing Lawbre staircase so I tried it out. It looked pretty good.
But then I decided to put the Pierce staircase in the big wooden dollhouse and it looks even better! So I'm making a Pierce-type staircase from scratch to put in the big wooden dollhouse.
