rbytsdy's Blog

Well it was a race to get the San Fran finished, and me plagued with allergies to boot, but I finally got it in the mail. Some pics- first of the base, which I covered with the brick powder treatment that came with the kit. I had never tried this stuff before and was a bit trepidatious, but it turned out pretty well; alot hardier than I had thought it was going to be. You would pretty much have to take a chisel to it to get it off!



I decided not to install any more window treatments than the one in the green room because I had run out of time! (And also because they would interfere with my stained glass and opening windows...) And now some finished pics, which I had to take inside because this house was too big and heavy and unwieldy to trot in and out:

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 cloth; I was very tickled when I found it at Joann's and didn't look closely enough when I was buying it, because this is NOT 100%-cotton...! I tried four different kinds of Aileen's tacky, and quick-grab barely manages to tack the cloth to itself. It fought me every step of the way. Very disappointing, but a lesson-learned to always check the fine print...



Also finally got around to buying some more quarter-round and assembled my base; glued the house on and have been affixing porch trim pieces. Also here is what the attic room looks like so far; need to trim up the stairwell but I have been having trouble telling apart my trim for the Willowcrest and for the San Fran and have been mixing them up because the off-white paint colors are so similar...! (So I think I accidentally stole Willowcrest stairwell trim pieces for the San Fran.)



So now the San Fran: I finally figured out what to do about all the wiring that was billowing out the back; I drilled some holes in the MDF of the back base and stuffed everything in under the house. Very much neater now. There is a slot that you can put your finger in to switch on the power strip.



I went back and forth about the green room curtains-- I had prepared the long olive-green drape pieces about a year ago, but in arranging them from the pelmet with spray starch, they wrinkled up really easily. (Had the same problem with this cloth in the Westville parlor drape assemblies-- it's really thin cloth.) So I made some runners to hide the wrinklies and add some visual interest-- I think I need to tack those upper runners down a bit so they don't stick out so much.



The living room is one of my favorite rooms in this house-- partly because I spent so much time and stained wood on it...!



I am waffling about the window treatments in the rest of the house. If I get too crazy with them, it'll hide my "stained-glass" that I spent SO much time on, not to mention it'll be difficult to run the window sashes up and down (the lower ones do move- they're not fixed in place). What to do, what to do...

Well while I ponder on that, I will get busy finishing the base of the San Fran, and the shingling on the Willowcrest. Have got to get that shingling over with already.

...that I did indeed drag out the San Fran and finish shingling: my Minwax golden pecan (oil-based) is almost gone now, but I think the shingles have some nice "pop" to them now.



You'll notice that I didn't cut the shingles to an angle to fit the tower slope; those shingles were not amenable to angle-cutting (they pretty much fell apart when I tried), so I decided to trim strategically there.

I have been wainscoting the Willowcrest rooms also, while waiting for me to get around to getting some suitable quarter-round so I can finish the baseplate:





That is a finely corrugated paper (Michael's) in the blue room; I have alot of white trim made up for it.

So I am working the San Fran AND the Arthur these days, trying to finish up for Christmas; finishing trim on the Arthur:



Finally finishing out the wiring routing on the San Fran, and done with shingling except for the dreaded tower:




I kind of like the natural look of the shingles, but I think that I will go ahead and stain them with Minwax maple to give them an extra "pop"-- I was careful in gluing them on, not to get glue on the surfaces to be stained, so it should do OK.

And-- all the lights work! (After tweaking a few loose bulbs and shaky connections...)

I am very eager to start work on the Westville-- it will be good to get back to a Greenleaf build again after all that MDF. A good friend of mine is expecting a little girl early next year, and the Westville will be her house-- I am thinking cream with lilac-toned accents because she is decorating the baby's room in lilac. I'm hoping that my Hobby Lobby has their 50%-off miniatures sale next week, because I need to get electricals and look for some lilac-toned scrapbook paper for the walls-- some stripey, and maybe some solid or subtle design to go with wainscoting... Oh, and some "modern" furniture sets. I think that I will be aiming for a vaguely 50's look.

In fact, I might even ditch Ernie's contest to work on the Westville-- that's how much I want to start on it!

It seems as though every time I build a house, I find more places to trim...! I don't know how many trim pieces I have prepped for the San Fran-- lost count a long time ago. I have been trying to calculate how much I need in each color, but I always seem to come up short. Well the good thing about using balsa for trim is that it's fairly trivial to make some more...



The green room needs vertical green pieces on the ends of that face that the door is on, and green edge pieces at the room edges, and something around the doorway:



The striped room needs some paint touchups before sealing, and white edge trim at the ceiling edge:



The living room needs stained edge trim, and something around the doorway:



The 3rd floor room needs the tower wiring routed and trimmed over (after I have installed the tower cap), and the back ceiling finished, and the edges finished in yellow:




And all of it needs a sealer coat or two.

Well the sooner I get this trim finished, the sooner I can get on to shingles and finishing the base. Haven't decided whether to use the brick powder and template that came with the kit; might try it just to say that I did...

Plugging along with the San Fran-- buckled down and prepared a bunch of trim, stained for the staircases and painted for the stripe-y room (formerly the blue room). I had some paper from Michael's that looks like floor tile that seems to go pretty well with the striped room; I didn't prepare it in advance with matte spray because I wanted it to have a bit of gloss, so I started gluing it (smeared white school glue) straight to the floor. Well I had one piece down when I thought, this is a mistake-- want to glue it to the cardstock template first. So I pried it off the floor, trying not to rip it (it was fragile stuff without a protective coating), and pasted it to the cardstock. A bit the worse for wear but pushing onward. Then I spread tacky glue on the back of the cardstock and installed the template onto the floor. I braced the edges with long wood strips (blue-taped to the walls) because that template wanted to curl.

After the floor was set, I got some Minwax acrylic (waterbased) semi-gloss and put on a coat-- the middle of the floor in particular started to bubble, which I got a bit excited about, so as soon as the gloss had set enough to not be tacky, I set about scrubbing the floor with a white cloth to try to lay it down. That helped a bit, so I put on another coat, and same problem. Well for some reason as the gloss dried, the floor seemed to even out! I don't know what happened and I don't even know if my frantic "scrubbing" did any good... But it's alot better now.



I also installed the ceiling moulding in the green room-- I had thought pretty hard about this one, wanting the dentil (I think it's called) moulding but also wanting something else-- in a blog post sometime back when I was just starting the San Fran is a picture that I had found of an art deco green room, and its ceiling trim has some subtle complexity that I had wanted to reflect. So this is not a copy of what's in that picture (don't have enough vertical room above the windows, and would look funny if I didn't carry the theme around the entire room) but it is (in a way) inspired by it. The trim is a combination of store-bought dentil trim and lengths of balsa-- I pre-painted the dentil but the rest I installed and painted in place (hence the newspaper).

I also am getting back on track with the staircases-- they've been sitting around long enough; time to climb!




Edit: well one can't see the trim tremendously well in these down-sized pics... But the little roundish things at regular intervals are beads of just the right height (3/8") that I got off some beaded trim that was on sale somewhere... Never know when these things will come in handy...

Well here is what the former blue room looks like now, with Hobby Lobby sale scrapbook paper, and I am glad that I made the change:



Just lately I have been working on something else, though-- a roombox for a friend that I have been thinking about for at least a year, now! I had first started messing around with a box that I found at a thrift store:



It wasn't nearly deep enough to really do anything, and I guess that's why it never took hold on me and got finished. But then I finally found the cocker spaniel that I needed and on sale too, and the ideas started coming in again, so I figured that I needed to build my own box. So last weekend I dragged hubby to Lowe's and got some 1/4" plywood (a 2'x4' sheet, I think it was) and marked it out according to what would fit well to a frame that I had found at a thrift store, and he cut out the walls for me. I dremeled and sanded the pieces to fit, and started laying out the room; I like foyers and staircases, and had a blast with the ones in the Beacon Hill, so I decided to make my own staircase out of balsa, using paper templates and a leftover stair from the San Fran to figure out the dimensions.








I printed out several wallpaper patterns (Jennifer's Printables) and chose this one because it looked the best as a backdrop for the wreath-- important since this will be a Christmas scene. (The others that I liked for this room were too dark or busy and detracted from the wreath colors...) Also above is a view of the other side of the staircase; I used tape and strategically placed toothpicks to hold some parts...! I staged some furniture pieces to get some sense of how the layout should be-- I am thinking a Christmas tree front and center, and a little upholstered chair in the understair with a little side table. My order from Manorhouse miniatures came in, so I have my (working!) Christmas lights; I had been planning to string them down the bannister, thinking that they were on one long string, but they're configured like an octopus with five strings, so I guess they'll go on the tree...

Here are my wall panels and flooring laid out to dry from staining; I used basswood for the paneling and floorboards:



This is alot of fun! It's good to take a little break from the house now and then...

I have been adding exterior trim this weekend, as well as spackle and paint to the window trim:




The tower is just on there for show-- I need to mount a lightbulb inside it before it can go on, not to mention those large trim pieces that go underneath it...

I glued the upper sashes in place, but there were more gaps at the top than not, so I trimmed the sash tops with pieces of painted balsa and spackled them into the rest of the upper window trim. I did the same thing in the doorways-- when I put the doors in place, there were huge gaps at the tops!

I am going back inside now-- I never quite liked how the blue room looked next to the green room, and I have an idea in mind involving some scrapbook paper that I found on sale the other day at Hobby Lobby... We'll see how it looks, if I can get the blue paper out...

I applied a dirty wash to the porch stones-- I think it was a few drops of burnt sienna and black:




That was last weekend, so this weekend I was ready to paint on some different colors. I used washes (diluted with water), and chose three main mixes: brown oxide, then pewter grey plus burnt sienna, then forest green plus pewter grey plus brown oxide.



I'll let this sit overnight then seal it a couple times.

Oh-- here I am trying to take a picture of what I had to do to the Lower Left Eaves (SF33) to get them to fit against the window trim; I dremeled down the angle to fit:



Here are some pics of installing the exterior trim (5-154) on windows and doors:




Here is the large Porch decor piece; I can see that I will have to sand down the end dowels to interface to those upper cornices... This is just a dry fit; I still have to see how the railing will fit in, and sand down the decor piece accordingly...




I did a bit of work in the bathroom, installing trim strips over my less-than-satisfactory wallpaper seams and the unsightly wire bumps under the lights. Hubby had gotten me some Melissa and Doug accessory packs for my birthday, and they came in handy here:




It seems a bit dark in here, which is why I wanted mirrors on the ceiling. I know I mention A&C Construction quite a bit, but one great bash that they did was a gable window off the bathroom; it really wants one, but I will forge ahead with what I have here, and put some nice pictures on that wall...

I have spackled and sanded down the exterior sills and cornices, so I am ready to paint those with my off-white and then seal them. Then I need to put some trim where the porch stones meet the wall (or rather, don't meet-- the paperclay shrank away from the walls as it dried), and then start installing the porch railing and decor pieces.

Well I felt like taking a break from the interior for a bit; here is the 3rd flooring finally installed, and the 2nd story staircase parts waiting to go in:



I needed to make some progress on the exterior, so I set about cutting the window trim for the windows that would be affected by installing porch pieces (some because of limited access, and some because there are porch pieces that actually interface to the window trim). I sawed it by hand and then fit each piece separately, using the Dremel to angle the ends, labeling each piece as to its location, painting and sanding to give a decent primer coat, and then gluing into place. The fits aren't perfect, but that's what spackle is for!



Once the trim was in place, then I could properly dry-fit the porch pieces. I got the idea from how A&C Construction did their San Fran porches, keeping the kit pieces for the balcony and substituting turned pieces for the front porch...




Something I had been thinking about from the beginning was doing some sort of stonework for the porch floors. I really liked how my little stone floor in my potting shed roombox turned out, so I decided to try to do the same thing here. I used a newspaper template to cut out the paperclay to fit the floor spaces (having marked where the railing sits), and etched out the stones before gluing the clay down. I think I will have to put some trim where the clay meets the wall, to make it look neater...



Here you can also see that since the 3rd flooring is down, I was able to put in the gable floor trim, which means that I was finally able to install the 3rd floor windows! (So many steps, so easy to say "well I can't do THAT yet because I haven't done this, this or this!") Also I have sawed out the rest of the window trim, as well as the door trim pieces.