iseecerulean

fireplaces

I made a big batch of gray glaze to do the fireplaces and all the trim, so I wouldn't run out.

Then I glazed the fireplaces, thought it looked yucky (top picture), so painted over the glaze with white paint (bottom picture)...a little of the gray shows through still, which looks pretty cool.

After all that messing around I bought some satin varnish to use on the fireplaces and the trim...I'm not going to try glazing the trim.

.

.

I got a catalog in the mail from miniatures.com...I told Matthew he's lucky I'm working in 1:24 scale instead of 1:12 scale because there's so much really cool stuff in 1:12 scale.  I gave the catalog to Bessie...it was too heartbreaking to have it here...I want this and can't have it, this and can't have it, this and can't have it, etc...

.

.

second fauxquet floor

It didn't turn out any better or any worse than the first one.

When I first put it in the room I hated it...too matchy-matchy.  This morning, looking at the picture, I don't hate it, but think I should have lined the patterns up so that the floor flows right up into the wallpaper...you know, if you're going to matchy-matchy, do it right.

I think I'll probably end up using the first floor.  What do you guys think?

that'll do

The faux parquet floor looks much better...it's not perfect, and I bet if I tried it again I could do better, but it's really not that bad.  It's in the foyer, which is a teeny room that can only be seen through another room, and it looks great in place.

Had I been paying attention to the wallpaper pattern, though, I'd have used my design with the squares between the octagons instead of the one with the diamonds between the octagons.  I didn't even realize the wallpaper had octagons until I looked at this picture...I picked it for the color and the scale of the pattern.  How cool that it has octagons!  Maybe I will do a different parquet floor...

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

The other wood floors turned out better because I remembered to sand the glue residue off before I stained them this time...yet there is still enough variation to give it an 'old wood floor' look, which I like. 

I'm not sure I'm going to bother sanding down and refinishing the bedroom floor, most of it will be covered by a rug anyway.  I haven't decided yet.

more flooring

The hardwood floors for the upstairs hallway and library have been laid...they need to be sanded and stained yet. 

I cut and papered a piece of balsa for the bathroom floor...it needs to be sealed yet.

The faux parquet floor for the foyer is coming along...my original pattern had a smaller octagon inside the big one, but I didn't cut it into the floor because I wasn't sure how difficult it would be to stain different areas different colors.  I figured it would be easier to add more detail later, and impossible to take away detail, so I started simply.  I don't like the pattern without that second octagon...you can't even tell there is an octagon the way it looks now, it looks like just diamonds...and it wasn't hard to keep the stain in separate spaces as long as I was careful...so I'm going to add the second octagon.

lighting is confusing...

I could use Houseworks fixtures (not the 'stained glass' ones though, yuck)... they're ready to install, but all in brass.

I could use LED lighting, which isn't hot and is longer lasting, but I'd have to make my own fixtures.

Or, I could use a combination of the two.

I like the idea of making my own fixtures...they would be unique.  I also like the idea of using LEDs.  On the other hand, I could probably paint the Houseworks ones, which would be much easier.

How do I power them?  Does either choice come with plug-ins or are the ends bare wire and I'd have to put on plug-ins?  Houseworks has a power strip, which looks more user-friendly than power supplies...could I use that with the LED lights, or would I have to use a power supply?  If I have to use a power supply which one do I need and how do I hook the lights to it?

I'm so confused.

now it's weird looking...

bedroom floor

It's got to be stained and polished yet, of course, but I wanted to show it to you now because I'm quite impressed with myself.  Something incredible happened...after I made it...it fit!
.

I spent most of last night polishing furniture...those poor things are in rough shape.  I got most of the tarnish off, but there are still some spots that are so damaged I'm not sure what I'm going to do.  After I got done cleaning them I played around with them inside the house...they're very cool.

The hinge on the big door of the icebox is broken...I'm not sure if it was that way before I cleaned the grime off or if I broke it.  I was working over the sink with the plug in, and I couldn't find any teeny metal pieces, but who knows.   I'll have to putty that door shut (I don't want to put glue on an antique).

scrub and scrub and scrub and scrub and scrub...

Whew!  It took a lot of elbow grease, but this is what they look like now.  I need to get some brass cleaner to finish the job...though I'm not sure I want all of them to be all the way clean.

A magnet won't stick to them, so I don't think they're brass plated, I think they're solid brass.

marcie rocks!

Marcie gave me these, they used to be her mother's.  She had tons of them...miniature stagecoaches, lamps, and telephones...a typewriter, microscope...etc...  Most of them have pencil sharpers in them...they're all really cool. 

I took the ones I thought I could use in my dollhouse...they're not scale miniatures but I think the size is right.  After everyone else at work that wants any goes through what's left I may grab a few more to use in future projects.

They appear to be either brass or brass plated...I need to clean them.  I like the look of them tarnished, but my hands got really grubby handling them and I don't want them to turn my dollhouse black.

what an odd weekend

Saturday felt like an entire weekend and Sunday felt like an afternoon.

The weather was fantastic on Saturday.  I puttered around on the computer while I had my morning coffee..I bought a rug for my dollhouse... if I like it I'm going to buy three more.  I browsed around Etsy too, but didn't see anything that caught my attention.

Kate worked at a charity run that a Dad of one of her girlfriend's organized...I dropped her off bright and early, then came back home, where Matthew and I spent some 'we've got the house to ourselves' time before we went downtown.  Downtown was nice...it was busy, but this time of year it was neighborly locals, not pushy tourists, so I didn't mind.  There was a shindig at the indy record store that Matt wanted to go to, so while he did that I went down to the hobby shop to get more crown molding, then popped into an art gallery and the hat store, where I got myself a new summer weight cloche.  I caught up with Matthew in the guitar store, helped him load his new bass guitar, bass amp and pile of records in the car, then we had lunch with some of his friends.

We got back home just in time for me to go get Kate and her girlfriend, Tess, from the mall, where Tess' Mom dropped them off after the race.  They took me down to Macy's to buy Kate "the cutest ever" prom dress, then we zipped over to Tess' house to pick up her bag, so she could spend the night...we visited with her family for a bit and Tess showed me some of the art she's made.  After we got back here I showed Tess my art (her favorite was the mermaid box you made me, Susan), then we went through my stash and I gave her some stuff I don't want anymore that she was excited to get...broken watches, doll parts, etc...  By the time we were done with that it was time for Dr. Who, dinner, and a couple of movies we own on DVD that Tess had been wanting to see, during which I fell asleep on the living room floor.

The weather was dreary Sunday...warm, but cloudy and drizzling.  I made new floor patterns on thin graph paper, then went to JoAnne's for black cardstock to transfer them to.  I sketched out a couple patterns for the faux parquet floor in the foyer and watched a couple hours of Top Gear in the afternoon when I needed a break, and that's pretty much all I did all day.  Blah.

As I was working on the floor patterns...holding a flashlight propped between my shoulder and cheek so I could see what I was doing...I really regretted my decision to not light the dollhouse.  I didn't anticipate exactly how dark the rooms were going to be once the house was put together...I assumed that with all the rooms open on one side they'd get plenty of light, but they don't really. 

It's too late now to run tapewire under wallpaper, but I'm sure I could still run round wire if I kept all the lights on the exterior walls, so I could run the wires through holes out to where I could hide them under the siding.  I've got to price everything out again to reassess my decision...though I'm pretty sure I'm going to light it...why go to all this work to make something I won't be able to see?

While I was at  JoAnne's I got three different papers as possibilities for the bathroom floor.  I was going to make a bunch of individual 1/4"x1/4" tiles out of basswood, but I'm just not up for that much more cutting and sanding... 

I like the flowery print one...as a floor it's unexpected but not out of the realm of possibility.

I was planning on doing all the rooms at the same time in stages...all the floors, then all the baseboard, all the crown molding, etc..  Now I think I'm going to do one room at a time instead, just because I'd really love to see one that's finished.

super pissed

Remember the before picture of the join in the hallway?  This is what it looks like now....only it looks like I need to do some more sanding, the camera sees better than the naked eye, apparently.  It's really, really hard to work in that narrow hallway.

(The line on the ceiling is the edge of a piece of masking tape I put up so that I didn't accidentally scratch the paint on the ceiling.)

.

.
.
I got the trim for the doors cut and painted, and the fireplaces painted.  I tried to set the interior doors in place, to double check the trim before I glue it in, but they won't fit.  I am super pissed.  I purposefully made sure to check the fit and sanded all the openings wider before I finished the walls and glued the house together.  Now  I've got to fuss with the openings in an awkward position and hope I don't screw up the wallpaper.  Dammit.

I also had to throw away the templates I made for all the floors except the foyer because they were a little off, and will have to make new ones.  Dammit again.

.
.
.
.
.

This is a before and after shot of the other side of the hallway.

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Here's one of the fireplace surrounds painted...they all look flat.  I've got to find a semi-gloss finish.  The gloss varnish I've got would make them too shiny I think, and I don't want to make a custom batch of paint/glaze medium mixture, because I know I'll either run out or tip the container over halfway through the project, and will never be able to re-create the same mix.   Maybe I'll go to the art supply store on my lunch hour today...or maybe I should try the gloss medium I've already got on a painted piece of scrap wood before I buy anything.  We'll see...

new to-do

Now that I've got the walls up I have to organize what needs to be done next so that I make sure I do things in the right order. 

• Check for miscellaneous joins that need to be spackled and/or sanded down 
• Fix the join in the hallway 
• Trim around door openings and install doors 
• Figure out hearthstones 
• Adjust floor patterns to compensate for doors and hearthstones 
• Make and install floors  
• Finish and install the stair rails
• Put in windows (but don't glue) and install trim around interior of windows 
• Finish and glue in fireplace surrounds 
• Install baseboard and crown moulding 
• Put up chair rail in dining room 
• Figure out wainscoting in living room 
• Install corner trim 
• Put shelves in bookcase  
• Make recess under kitchen stairs into a china cabinet 

Oh my, there's a lot more to be done than that, but I don't want to think further ahead right now, this list is long enough.

check this out!

what a day...

I'm not going to tell you how long it took me to make the fireplaces...how many extraneous cuts it took because I'm angle retarded...how I'd cut a piece, sit it on the table in front of me, then it would vanish into thin air, so I'd cut another one, and it would reappear.  I won't tell you how the design of the upstairs fireplaces ended up looking absolutely horrible, so I had to redesign and remake them. 

Instead I'm just going to show you this pretty picture of my assembled, sealed, ready to be painted fireplaces.

I also won't tell you about how when I dyed my hair yesterday (brown, it needs to rest) I dropped my hand mirror and broke it, knocked my towel into the bathtub while I was rinsing, and got a glop of dye on my bathroom rug..or about how I over-did the highlights so bad that I went to the store for another bottle of dye so I could start over.

Despite the very bumpy ride I did get done the three things I really wanted to get done yesterday...the fireplaces, my hair, and our taxes.

last? dry fit

I'm glad I did another dry fit...there was a wall in the bedroom and a wall in the foyer that I missed papering.  I've got that taken care of now, and the dining room ceiling finished.

If you look through the bedroom door (second floor, burgundy papered room) you can see the wall in the hallway...it's an awfully ugly seam where that comes together.  I'm going to attempt to spackle, sand and paint it after the house is together, but I'm not sure how successful I'm going to be, since there's not going to be a lot of room to work in that hallway.  I think I'm going to end up hanging a picture over a narrow hall table...

.

.

.

.

It occurred to me when I was papering the ceiling that it would be a good idea to put in some kind of hook to hang the chandelier from before I put the house together...I'd never fit my dremel in the house.  I drilled a hole in the center of the room (I purposefully centered the design of the paper when I glued it in),  I ran a silver eye pin up through a copper spacer and the hole in the ceiling, bent the tail of the eye pin over, superglued it into an indented line in the floor I gouged out, then put a piece of masking tape over it.  I gouged out a line in the floor of the library above so the tail of the eye pin would sit flush and I wouldn't have a bump in the library floor.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

I got the fireplaces started.  The one on the right is for the dining room, I need to make another just like it for the living room.  The one on the left is for the bedroom or library...it isn't done yet...I have to figure out tiles yet, and I didn't measure for the mantle correctly so it's too short (I'll probably use it as a shelf somewhere) and I have to make another one.

The dining room one looks Georgian instead of Victorian, because of the dentil moulding, but I like it.

papering is done

Is it starting to look like a house yet?

I ran the string of mini LED lights down through the inside of the fireplace...they don't give off enough light to do anything. 

That's the same reason I didn't use them in your Hallow box, Susan...I was going to string them along the pergola roof so you could light the box up, but they barely give off any light.  I was hoping in an enclosed firebox they'd be more effective, but I think that even if I had lined the inside of it with reflective paper when I put it together, the lights still wouldn't work.  I don't want to use regular Christmas lights, because I don't want anything that gives off heat.

Now that I don't have to dink around with lights...which is both disappointing and relieving...I can do another dry fit.  I want to make sure I don't need to anything more with paper or paint before I clear my worktables off.  After I've got room to work I can pull out all the trim I bought and start constructing fireplace surrounds.

starting to feel like I'm getting somewhere

The openings for the windows have been enlarged and I've started to wallpaper.  I got the bedroom, dining  room, and bathroom papered, I've got to do the foyer and the tower room yet, then the dining room, living room and library ceilings.  If I get that done tomorrow, and figure out if I'm going to light the fireplaces, I can start gluing walls together on Sunday. 

Oh shoot, no I can't, I want to build the fireplace surrounds first while I can lay the fireplaces flat on my worktable...then when I've got the walls erected I can glue the surrounds on in one piece.

I had a dumb moment papering the bedroom.   The fireplace is already papered, with the paper pattern oriented up-down...when I cut the paper for the rest of the walls I oriented it all left-right.  Thank goodness I caught my mistake before I glued it to the walls!  I went to the scrapbook store on my lunch hour yesterday to buy another sheet of the paper...they had one piece left...whew, I got lucky.

When the lady at the store reacted to my relief I told her about what I'd done...she told me I was the third person in the last couple of days that said they were working on a dollhouse, and asked if I was in the show too.  The show?  Apparently there's a diorama/dollhouse/miniature exhibit the fourth weekend in May at the Heritage Center.  I told Bessie about it when I got back to work, we're planning on going together.

I'd have probably never heard about the show otherwise, so I guess my bad mistake had a good result.

eye candy

Kits to make flowers and plants.

Dolls House Miniatures has gorgeous stuff, none of which is in the scale I'm working in, but if you're in the mood to browse 1/12 scale minatures...

A true miniature artisan...not working in my scale and way out of my price range, but her work is incredible.

Bessie, this link's for you!

Okay, enough of that, I'm just playing on the internet so I can put off sanding.

I got the bay window walls prepped, put a second coat of stain on the doors, and was getting ready to wallpaper when I thought I should make sure the windows fit first.

They don't...of course.  I'm going to have to sand each and every one of the eleven window openings.  I got the first four done then had another thought (I'm just a bit slow in the brilliance department lately)...I should paint the window first, so that I don't have to re-sand all the openings after I add layers of paint to the window's dimensions.  I got two layers of paint on the window...it's detailed, tedious work (I bought twelve pane windows).  I'm hoping when I come home tonight and look at it that two coats will have been enough...I skipped sealing it first, because I didn't think I could put on thick, clear sealer without getting glops in the corners of the window panes.  It's hard to tell with soft wood, it soaks up paint and stain like you wouldn't believe, even after it's been sealed first...the doors looked fine for a couple of days before they faded.

to-do list

• build bay windows
• put second coat of stain on doors
• put on doorknobs
• finish making floor patterns
• paper walls and ceilings
• decide whether or not to put wainscoting in the living and/or dining rooms
• play around with the idea of lighting the fireplaces
• build fireplace surrounds
• paint and assemble the windows...figure out if I can make the top panes look like stained glass
• figure out interior and exterior trim for the windows

painting

Lots of painting this weekend, another dry fit (which went a lot better than the last one), and more painting.  The green dried darker than I thought it would, but I still like it.  I think I've got the painted walls and ceilings done, I can paper the rest of them now.

Oh shoot, except the walls for the bay windows, I haven't even punched those out yet...I need to get started on those.

I finished altering the doors, then sealed and stained them.  They're not quite as dark as I want, so I need to give them another coat of stain.  The front door was hard to do, because it's got a lot of fancy, non-removable trim...I stained very carefully with a small paintbrush. 

I ended up staining more interior trim than I was anticipating...there is a transom window that doesn't come out, and I figured it would be easier to stain the wood around it without screwing up the acrylic than it would be to paint around it and not screw up the acrylic...on the deeply recessed interior anyway, I'm going to paint around the transom on the exterior.

I'm not looking forward to painting the rest of that trim....heck, I'm not even looking forward to figuring out what color to paint on which part!

The front door doesn't have as deep a doorjamb as the interior doors, because of all the trim, so I didn't have to alter it beyond moving the hinge to the other side because the door opened the wrong way.  I'm kind of disappointed, I was thinking I could make a fancy screen door to sit in the doorjamb too, only there's not room...well, I suppose there is, if I can keep it thin...I'll have to see...I suppose it's going to depend on the thickness of the millwork trim I'm going to order.

Let's see, what else did I do....I got the treads cut, stained, and glued on the upper staircase..and the missing one for the lower staircase too.  I got paper patterns started for some of the floors...but I think I'm going to wait until the house is glued together before I start on flooring.  I can't decide what to do in the foyer...marble tile like the kitchen, hardwood like the living room, or a fancy parquet flooring?

I need to review the to-do lists I've made to make sure I'm not missing anything, then make another list, as some things have changed based on what I've learned during the dry fits.

I rock!

I had to make the stairs shorter and narrower, then cut a hole in the attic floor...it worked so well that it's sitting perfectly in just the right spot, nothing's glued yet.

Except I'm going to make the hole in the attic floor a bit longer, it doesn't look like there's enough head room...

dry fit three

This is a shot of what I did to fix the staircase wall...it's been sanded, spackled and painted since then... if you look at the next picture you'll notice that I fixed it about 1/8 of an inch too short, there's still a gap.  The gap is small enough now to cover with corner trim, so I have to decide if I want to do that, or if I want to cut out my repair and fix it right.

This dry fit wasn't as easy as the last two...somewhere during the process the house's name changed from Fairfield to Coc****ker...I was right about the layer of sealant I put on the wood changing the fit of the pieces.

It's snowing again this morning...I'm so sick of snow.  My yard hasn't been green since mid-November.  When is Spring going to get here?

I'm grouchy this morning...

.

I'm grouchy this morning....

.

hands of a thousand splinters

I got a lot done yesterday while I was home babying Kate. 

I cut out holes for the octagonal windows...got all the walls and floors sanded and sealed, which took up the bulk of my time (and hurt!)...got the first coat of paint on the painted rooms, so that I can see where they need to be spackled and sanded more...patched the wall by the stairs that I screwed up (I'll show a pic of that later)...and altered the first of the four doors. 

Altering the door was a little more work than I expected...the threshold piece is thicker on one side of the door than the other, to act as a doorstop, so had to be cut back...it's made out of very soft wood though, so it was easy.

I need to do another dry fit...I'm sure now that the tabs and grooves have a coat of sealant that I'm going to have to fine tune the fit again.