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Willowcrest, San Fran, Westville, Beacon Hill and others

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Working on the foyer.

Well I haven't gotten alot done on the 1st floor foyer; I finally made it to Hobby Lobby today, for their biannual 50%-off-minis sale: I got the electrical strip and transformer for the Willowcrest, as well as lights, a few furniture sets, some building and hardware supplies, a bunch of basswood (40% off), and some odds and ends including some nice scrapbook paper that I think I might use for the kitchen instead of the sunflower paper that I printed out. I also went to
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Working on staircase.

Today I can finally get back to my staircase, after a couple weeks... I measured out and painted some stair rods, using gold + burnt umber mix to complement the beads that form the ends: I was dissatisfied with the gold-toned ribbon because it did not seem to relate to the wallpaper well, so I found some wired red at Walmart: I think that will do. I might use the gold-toned for the 2nd floor staircase. Right now I am panelling the staircase b
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Working my way up...

Got my matte "tile" sheets in from Miniatures Marketplace at a good price; found tiffany lamp shades there too. That sheet in the kitchen has lilac accents. Mounting the second floor ceiling lights from the underside of the ceilings, so prepared all the papers and cutouts, used my Dremel to groove the underside, installed the 2nd floor (messed up my purple wallpaper there-- will have to trim or patch ), turned the house on its side, laid the wires i
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Working my way up.

I guess it's been a couple more weeks! Nasty colds and work... I got the towel rack installed in the bathroom: Still thinking about how to treat the lower wall there. I did some flooring work for the bedroom; here it is in dry fit: I decided to leave it as is instead of staining it so that it would not clash with the furniture. I brushed on a sealer and glued the floor in place; it is not as shiny and smooth as I would like so I am going to b
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Working in the kitchen.

Well I have been picking away at this and that, here and there-- I didn't like how the interior door frames looked in the kit design, so I pre-assembled them to fit and added a line of trim. Here I have been working on the kitchen door, with a dutch door of my own design (I just cut the kit door into two, and trimmed it): I have a wooden decoration for the foyer side, and I'll put a nail (cut-off sewing pin) on the kitchen side to hang an apron or something... &
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Wing chair for roombox.

I wanted to make a wing chair, and started off with the pattern from Vivienne Boulton's book The Dollhouse Decorator; it's a simple pattern but I wanted to see how the size worked out, and modify it from there. That sad pile on the far left is the first attempt; the cloth was unworkable and I quickly figured out some ways to improve the assembly. The purple one, I cut the inner form into three pieces and installed them separately. The third, I tried some more tricks with how I put it together. &
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Windows.

After sanding, painting, resanding, spackling, resanding, painting and sealing, here is what I came up with for single and double windows: Pretty exciting, huh. But here are some pieces in place in the 2nd floor bedroom: The purple paint tape left smudge marks on some pieces of wallpaper but not others... Hmmm... My plan is to put paneling up near the ceiling, so that should cover the smudges if I make it come down far enough... I will
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Windows, or why it takes me so long to finish a build!

After cutting down the dormer a bit, finalizing the window placement, and cutting out the windows and doors: Trying to figure out where the upstairs divider should be: I think it will be this one, because it makes sense for me for the (smaller) powder room to be over the kitchen. I seem to take a long time with windows in general. I don't know what it is, but I find myself fussing over window trim and detail more, it seems, than any other feature. These win
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Window-works.

Got my papers glued on: As per usual, spending extra time on the windows. Decided to go with modification of Kris' matboard windows-- I'll leave out the sashes because they add weakness to the window structures (but mostly because they are difficult enough for me to get straight, speaking from experience, let alone those evil curves ). Fit each casing to each window opening, using Kris' scored matboard trick to do the curves:
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Window troubles...

I have been touching up paint on trim-- --and dealing with the fact that I should have installed the exterior window trim first! (I think it even says that in the instructions...) If I had done that, like I did with the Westville, then I could have spackled and painted 'til the cows came home with no worries about mussing the window transparencies... Well I ended up having to scrub spackle off all my windows (with a wetted q-tip), and adding some extra trim to h
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Window treatments.

Now this is some fun stuff, even though I have trouble exercising patience at some points...! I have been making pelmets: So far I have ones for the parlor bays (beige print with gold fringe), the 2nd floor double and single windows (paisley with silver rat-tail cord), the 3rd floor blue room (blue! with gold rat-tail cord) and the 3rd floor room with bird wallpaper (green with no trim). Here's where my patience comes in-- the pleating part. Up to n
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Window treatments for the parlor.

I spent a bit of time making tassels from caseymini's tutorial and finally got two of the parlor drapery sets installed-- ...and finally got around to picking up some coarse-grit sandpaper. I had in my head that it was 60-grit, and when I compare this to what is on top the bays, the paper on the bays is 40-grit. Oh well. I think I'll work on some trim in the 2nd floor bedroom before I tackle those parlor bay window draperies...
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Window dressing.

But first, some little things that my mother gave me for Christmas: Aren't they neat! My favorites are the turkey and goose and little green glass bird on the upper left, and the jug with a cork in it near the front. I wonder where she found them! Here's my solution to gaps on the mansard roof! They are strips cut from a cracker box; Dada's blog http://dadasdollhouse.wordpress.com gave me the idea to use thin cardboard strips (they use cereal boxes!) and
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Winding up...

Well my work on this house is coming to an end-- I can keep finding little things here and there, but at some point I have to call it quits! Some pics: The little plaque is in Hebrew (my niece derives from a line of scholars), and was made by my parents for this house. And here is something I bet you don't see everyday-- a Pierce without any front steps... I dug out the Pierce from its storage spot (half in,
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Willowcrest/San Fran: race to the finish

Boy-oh-boy, time is getting away from me. Well I have been piddling around with both the Willowcrest and the San Fran, because I want to get them in the mail for Christmas; I finished routing the lighting in the Willowcrest, including a lightbulb in the bathroom closet (this is before I glued in the piece that encloses the closet): I also finished up the kitchen, using my paint-sand mixture leftover from the Buttercup. I am very disappointed in the tiny-yellow-checked
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Willowcrest 2 progress.

Well there has been a bit of work here, getting the 1st floor staircase ready to install: Here the assembled staircase is drying while I have it in place where it will sit in the house, to try to keep it square. But before I can install the staircase for good, a number of things have to happen in this little foyer, because once all the walls go up, there is no getting in there; this time around, I have installed the front door first off so that I don't have all t
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Willowcrest - also finished!

I got the San Fran in the mail and had to take several extra days to get the Willowcrest in the mail also due to just feeling too sick to work very hard on it! But it finally got packed up also (had to patch together two garment boxes to box it in), despite me continuing to find little patches that needed extra paint or an extra piece of trim, and tracking tells me that it showed up at its destination today, so that is good. A view of the front doors: The
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Willow staircases.

I bored out a hole in the 3rd floor for the 2nd-story stairwell, by overlaying the 2nd floor (which has the same perimeter size) and tracing the stairwell hole onto the 3rd floor. Then I cut out the stairwell hole piece from the 3rd floor with the Dremel using a thin sanding wheel piece (which I discovered does a decent job of this when I was bashing the last spring fling build). I primed, sanded down, and then glued the main pieces together, laying the house on a side to try to weigh down some
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Willow progress.

Even though it may not look or feel like it, I guess that I have actually made alot of progress with the Willow-- I finally decided that painting the window trim red would be too much, so I went with a few coats of off-white blends. I also decided that yes, I did need shutters...! Even though they are very time-consuming, I really like the look. The frame is in raw umber, and the slats are an off-white to match the window trim; I cut and glued in each slat individually, then sprayed the finishe
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Willow dryfit.

Well here is the Willow in its first dry-fit; finally opened the box to build it instead of raid it for siding and shingles! It is a very plain house-- I believe not Georgian, as some of the kit descriptions out there say, but Colonial salt-box. And a very large one at that. My thought is that there is not a challenge in the actual building of it, but in dressing it-- the exterior and interior treatments. I am thinking stone exterior (I have an abun
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What have I been doing for the past 2 months...

Well I saw this and got inspired to make my own crazy quilt! The other two are by means of English paper piecing, 3/8" squares-- it's the only way I can keep it looking neat. Boy this is addicting. The two paper-pieced quilts are still stiff, mostly due to still having their papers in them. I need to de-paper, then back the quilts. I hope these new pics added to my gallery don't mess up my pics in my blog posts for the past couple yrs. With the new upgrade, the mapp
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Well...

...I've seen worse first-coats of paint. First coat always looks the worst though. This is Valspar interior satin, a tint-match to the Valspar "Pristine Petal" that I used on my first pink Tennyson.
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Well so much for red stair runner...!

Well I finally figured out what I should've seen in the first place-- the red ribbon was just too wide for the stair rods...! And I couldn't make longer rods, or else they wouldn't fit between the spindles, because I had not spaced the spindles away from the risers enough. Well moving on-- I went ahead and used the gold-toned ribbon after all, because it was the right width for the rods... At this point, I need to finish the lower panel work, and put all the upp
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Well lookie here...

...what came in the mail today! But it must sit and wait for a bit. The Arthur is first on the list. Who knows when it will get here, with an advertisement of "3 to 16 business days"...! Meanwhile, I am working on the Corona Concepts furniture kits for the Arthur: I have more done than this; I'll take some more pics this weekend...
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Waste not, want not...

Well I was determined not to buy shingles and still had alot of shingles leftover from various houses, and decided to use the hexagon ones; I ended up scrounging through all my scrapwood stashes and converting a fair number of fishscale to hexagon, but finally made it. Don't worry folks, it doesn't stay this color! The first coat of paint: An in-progress pic showing my attic flooring, half-way through sanding it (and before I stained it):
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