"Go ahead, touch the Cornballer. You know best."

I love "Arrested Development", so I have to sneak a few references to the show into this dollhouse. (If you haven't seen it, "Arrested Development" is a brilliant, insanely detailed, wickedly funny sitcom about a wealthy Newport Beach family who lose everything when their patriarch, George Bluth Sr., gets arrested for defrauding shareholders.)

One of the show's many recurring jokes is the Cornballer, a fry-at-home hush-puppy device George invented in the 1970s...which was promptly banned because it caused severe burns (which didn't stop George from continuing to market the Cornballer in Mexico).

Of course, I had to make a Cornballer (out of basswood, illustration board, wood putty, aluminum paint, and a toothpick). It's definitely not a perfect copy - my attempts to copy the fryer basket weren't successful, so I omitted it and have decided that this particular device has been broken for years but the family living in this house still haven't gotten around to tossing it in the scrap metal recycling bin.

I also couldn't resist making a few more related items: "Boyfights" videos, a copy of "The Man Inside Me", a 45 of "Big Yellow Joint", and copies of the "Balboa Bay Window" (unfortunately, I have not yet been able to get a clear, full shot of the issue in which a 10-year-old Buster Bluth explains why he wants to marry his mother).

The imaginary people who live in this house are NOT members of the Bluth clan (you won't find Teamocil in the medicine cabinet, a dead dove in the freezer, or a stair car in the driveway), but since they live in the same geographic region, it's plausible for at least some of these items to be found in their house.

I also made one more accessory referencing the show that isn't pictured here. I'm going to unveil it later, after the interior is finished (it's not a scale model of the banana stand - I'm not that good yet).

Completed Exterior

I FINALLY finished the bungalow's exterior.

The "solar panels" are made from leftover Greenleaf greenhouse roof panels and black illustration board. I painstakingly marked off a tiny grid of 1/8" squares on each piece of mat board with an ordinary mechanical pencil and coated the whole thing with several layers of Mod Podge. (This was also an easy way to conceal a large area of badly warped roof shingles.)

The front porch in place (again). I can't help it; I just love how this house is shaping up.

Now to get started on the interior...

Exterior Preview

I know it's been a while since my last post, but I promise I've been working on the exterior, schedule and weather permitting. Here's a little sneak peek (please ignore the shadows):

Stay tuned...

Bungalow Porch

I can't imagine a bungalow without a porch, can you?

To make the porch, I cut a base (dimensions are based on where the inspiration house's porch lines up with the windows), then dredged up enough geometry to riddle out how long to make the porch roof pieces (matching the roof angle, of course). 

After gluing and puttying the roof pieces together (I also scored the undersides to look more like boards), I cut and glued the trim in place and painted it white. Then, I cut the support beams and attached them to the base (using staples AND glue for extra stability). 

Next, I glued the tops of the beams to the underside of the porch roof. After more drying, I shingled and aged the roof.

Next step: making the plywood base look like old, worn poured concrete. Taking inspiration from Otterine's concrete "breaker", I applied a thin layer of wood putty, sanded it once dry, then applied two thin layers of hard-finish Mod Podge (it was the closest thing to gel medium I had) to smooth it out even further. Then: paint!

I think the porch needs some more dirty washing, but I already love how realistic it looks.

Finishing the Roof

I routinely find myself puzzling over ways to have realistic room layouts in a dollhouse while still having the contents be accessible. In a real house, it's not unusual to have furniture against the outside walls, but this is a problem if you have an open back wall (as with American-style dollhouses) or a front wall that swings out (as with English-style dollhouses).

However, this re-booted bungalow solves that problem very neatly. Since it's a single-story home, I designed it so the roof could simply be lifted off for access to the interior. (It's working much, much better than the complicated, multiple-opening-panel approach I tried first.) 

So, the roof structure is complete, the shingles have been applied and aged, and it's on to the next steps.

I had some shingles in my stash, but they weren't uniform enough in size for all of them to be used. However, I did have some Greenleaf clapboarding strips as well. They didn't quite work for the siding, but their near-perfect uniform width was just right, and the grain and shading varied just enough to suggest a real, old roof with the odd replaced shingle. So, I sliced two and a half bags of clapboarding strips into shingles - it was a lot of work, but well worth it.

Following a tip on Pepper's blog, I opted to age the shingles rather than staining them, since this house is based on a real, early-20th-century house that doesn't appear to have seen much, if any, updating. Below, you can see the bare birch shingles on one side of the roof with the other side still wet from its first round of aging solution.

Close-up.

After two rounds of aging, the roof looked pretty similar in color to the inspiration house's actual roof. There were a few spots where the aging didn't take, so I strategically covered them with some "moss" I had. The shingles have warped up in a few places, but I have some ideas for covering them that I will address later.

The finished roof. More to come...

Tiny Versailles!

And now you know why work on the bungalow has been so slow for so long...I've been hard at work on a top-secret, micro-scale project.

This is Phase 1 of a 1:144 Versailles. Except for the tiny LEDs (which were a disproportionately huge pain in the behind), this is all illustration board, Bristol board, clay, and pre-made 1:144 windows/doors.

I must have been out of my mind when I decided to do this...I am wiped out and STILL need to finish the side wings, the garden facade, the interiors, and (a small portion of) the grounds.

Donald Duck and Dollhouses

Even if you think you don't like cartoons, you might enjoy "Out of Scale" (below), starring Chip, Dale, and everyone's favorite loose cannon, Donald Duck. This is one of my very favorite cartoons, largely for the scale-model plot (also, it's funny).

(Perhaps not coincidentally, Walt Disney had a 1/8 scale train in his backyard, built the year before "Out of Scale" was made!)

For extra fun, "Chip and Dale's Rescue Rangers" had an episode featuring dollhouse antics:

And as long as I'm posting about Disney...

I have a long-running desire to surround a miniature house with realistic landscaping, which I blame on Disneyland's Storybook Land (side note: I would LOVE to know how they weatherproof those tiny houses - not to mention how to electrify a very tiny, apparently freestanding outdoor structure). Every setting is so finely detailed and enchanting that you might forget you're not three inches tall. I'm planning to landscape ALL future builds (except for select urban settings) because it really adds to the magic.

Sadly, the equally tiny Safari Adventure that stood at the Disneyland Hotel was removed a few years ago. I sometimes wonder where those little boats are now...if I ever have a back garden again, I'd like to try building something like this.