Ris

I added a picture for clarification. The problem is that the surface area I would glue is just so small, it has nothing to grab hold of

I am building a Beacon Hill dollhouse. I have tried to stop using hot glue ever since it was pointed out to me that hot glue won't keep as well in my dollhouse long term. I've been using mostly wood glue, which has worked well. Now I'm doing step Y - exterior trim. I used wood glue last night to attach the very small, single thickness bay window brackets. However, I just took the tape off and they snap right off with any pressure at all. It doesn't seem like wood glue did the trick this time. How do I get these little guys to stay put? Thanks!!

Ah, sorry I was too late. You'll be able to get it to work, you'll just need to widen the notches on the sill. When you do get to the windows, I recommend gluing the sills and window tops together before painting, every millimeter counted for me. Perhaps it was my specific cutouts, or all my chickens coming home to roost from when the walls and floors didn't fit together perfectly, but the pieces in the windows just didn't really fit. Thinking about it more, I don't think the siding was to blame. Hopefully you have better luck than I did :-) Note - the sashes are the only thing that really NEED to be painted first. You don't want a painty mess on the plastic window sheets.

I did the siding after the vertical and horizontal trim but before the windows. Installing the windows was one of the hardest parts of the project, nothing seemed to quite fit right. If I had to do it again, I'd probably do the siding last. A tip on the siding: for the parts of the wall that are very thin, you can use a half piece of siding held vertically and glue small pieces of siding to that to construct and independent piece and just glue that one thing to the house. Look at the bottom right corner of this picture, it is the piece I made for the tiny corner to the right of the kitchen bay on the back side of the house - https://www.flickr.com/photos/30210504@N05/21416924303/in/album-72157652409834015/ I also found that cutting the pieces and labeling them with letters to match lettering I added to the house was a very helpful way to organize the work -https://www.flickr.com/photos/30210504@N05/21850214148/in/album-72157652409834015/ This way I was able to cut a bunch of pieces and glue them to the house, instead of cutting and gluing one at a time. Hope this helps, good luck!

@Sable - just wanted to come back to this and let you know that I didn't understand what you meant about the slant at first, but it all came together in my head when we started to put the shingles on. Thanks for that great tip!

Anyone else have some starter tips or guides for shingling? Not sure I want to invest in the dollhouse.tv subscription at the moment.

Shingling the mansard roof is on the horizon for me. It seems like an intimidating step. So far, I have cut outs for each of the roof pieces. Right now the cut outs are on wrapping paper (only because it was big enough to hold the full cut out). Is there a better type of paper to glue them to which I can then glue to the house? Since shingles are not included in the directions, I'm not sure when I should do them. Should it be before I put the window frames on or after? I know you all are pros, so I was hoping to get some tips on what the best approach is for shingling the house. I also saw some reference in another forum post to these pre-made shingles (http://www.wnxt.net/product/38-1). Thoughts on using these?

Thank you! Oh no! I didn't realize hot glue was so bad, unfortunately it is probably too late for my first dollhouse. I wish I joined this community last year. Does the glue fall apart because of the temperature/humidity of the room it is in? Is there anything I can do now to help keep it in good shape? For future reference, do wood glue and Aileen's tacky glue dry quickly? I've seen some videos online of dollhouse construction, and it seems like every stage involves some kind of clamping and taping. The nice thing about hot glue is the immediate drying. Is there a happy medium? Thanks again!

Great, thank you for the ideas! I'll post back here after I finish the dollhouse and make the photo book to let you all know what I tried and how it went. Thanks again!

Interesting idea, I hadn't considered that! I didn't mention this in my intro post, but the dollhouse is my first real arts and crafts project (ambitious, I know!). I think you are right that I could print the pictures really small. Do you have any idea how I could then bind it together, or what material I should use to make the album cover front and back? I might use be able to just glue the pictures and use construction paper, but I'm not sure that would look good. Any other suggestions welcome, thanks again!

Thanks for the warm welcome everyone! It is nice to know that everyone else finds it so addictive too! We have definitely made a lot of mistakes in our travels, but we are learning from them and getting better. At first, we used way too much hot glue, thinking we could pick it off later. No such luck! We're going to try to put down molding in the house to cover up some of the glue mistakes. The stairs don't look too good though, they might be a lost cause. My mother in law and I had a great relationship to start with, but even so, it has been a great bonding experience. I've been posting our updates here - https://flic.kr/s/aHskaVbHBM. We've done about 20 days of work this year. Next step is the chimney, then we move on to the windows. Progress!

I've been building my dollhouse for about a year now. After each build day, I have taken pictures of the dollhouse which I'm planning to make into a video when it is complete. I had a great idea to also turn those pictures into a tiny dollhouse-sized photo album. Does anyone know of any stores or websites which would print me a tiny tiny photo album? Thanks!

Hey Everyone! I'm a new member - new to the forums and new to the hobby. About a year ago at this time I was shopping for Christmas ornaments with my mother-in-law, when she told me that she always wanted to make a dollhouse. Thinking I was the daughter-in-law of the year, I ordered the beacon hill dollhouse kit. I had NO CLUE what I was getting myself into. I felt like I had made a huge mistake when I opened the box and saw the schematics and all those sheets of woods! Not to mention all the shingles falling out of the box! Slowly but surely we've been chipping away at the dollhouse, and much to my surprise, I am obsessed with it! I can't believe how much I love it! It's been a great project for us so far. I definitely think this will be the first of many dollhouses for me.