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Have you ever stained a dollhouse?


fov

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I'm starting work on a half scale Seaside Villa, and I'm thinking about staining it instead of painting it. It's going to be a beach house and I'd use gray stain, I thought that would give it more of a weathered look than paint, plus it would be quicker than painting. The shell is already assembled and I'm planning to add siding, so I would stain the siding before gluing it on to avoid issues with glue.

I'm not sure if I've ever seen a stained dollhouse before. Has anyone here done it? Do you have pictures?

(Actually now that I've said that, I did stain a dollhouse once! But it was a log cabin, not a house with clapboard siding.)

You can see pictures of the house on my blog: http://www.emilymorganti.com/blog/?p=14263

The windows are Majestic Mansions and they're already painted white. I'm planning to match the paint at Home Depot and use the same white for the porch railings.

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I popped over to your blog, and staining it grey with those lovely white windows sounds gorgeous. I have only seen antique dollhouses that were stained brown. If the staining turns out to be ugly, you can always put a coat of kilz or Zinser over it, and start over. Luckily you are staining the siding, so you can do a small mock up to see if it is what you want.

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I stain all my spackle "stucco" finishes using paint washes.  When I built the Coventry Cottage I made the isopropyl alcohol & India ink mixture and stained both the plywood and the siding strips with it to age it that silvery-gray color, then I gave the whole thing a wash with diluted white paint, wiping most of it off to get that patina my husband's grandparents' house in Lumpkin, GA, had.

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I stained the now defunct Chalet siding before applying to the plywood base.  It turned out reasonably well other than the fact that one can of stain I had was bad. :glare: So, my advice is to test it first before doing whole panels.  I see no reason why the grey wouldn't work as well.  I think it will be lovely!

http://www.otterine.com/blog/blog1.php/mt-sydney-chalet-greenleaf-spring

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Thanks for the replies! These all look nice!

I'm going to be using Houseworks clapboard siding, not strips, so I'm concerned some sheets may come out a slightly different color than others. Normally I would cut all my pieces and then stain, but in this case maybe I should stain the sheets and then cut them, so I can make sure all the pieces on one wall have the same tint.

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I have had very good luck on many different wood projects using SamaN water- based stain.  It's not cheap but a little goes a long way..  There are 28 different colors available, plus you can get a mixing chart that gives formulas for well over 100 different colors.  It looks great on birch plywood, not too bad on lauan

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I used stain on the siding on my abandoned cabin and my Old West general store.  The trick is to experiment with different gray stains.  Some of them look great, but others just look like gray paint or barely show up at all.  I found Varathane gray stains worked best.

1 P1030901.JPG

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22 hours ago, fov said:

Thanks for the replies! These all look nice!

I'm going to be using Houseworks clapboard siding, not strips, so I'm concerned some sheets may come out a slightly different color than others. Normally I would cut all my pieces and then stain, but in this case maybe I should stain the sheets and then cut them, so I can make sure all the pieces on one wall have the same tint.

On 3Bears I used siding sheets cut to size and prestained using MiniWax stain. I think I used golden oak because I wanted a fairly light color. I stained first to avoid any glue issues later. :) 

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