Jungle Cruise boathouse tour (pic heavy!)

Welcome aboard! My name is Anna K. and I'll be your skipper, dance instructor, lifeguard, and social director for the next 15 pictures...or as far as we get.

I highly recommend opening this video in another tab and enjoying Albert Awol's humorous broadcast as you enjoy this tour of my tiny tribute to the World Famous Jungle Cruise.

I had to leave a few exterior things unfinished, but Undersized Urbanite is all about decorating, and I did manage to wrap up the interior. I'll re-visit the canopy over the stairs as soon as I figure out how to make it.

I shuffled some of the signage around (and I wish the removable office roof would stay put...). By the way, trimming a window down to size is really, really hard and I don't recommend it.

A peek inside. In real life, this room is filled by posts and chains directing the queue (also, as I had to selectively compress the boathouse to keep it a manageable size, the real-life room is MUCH bigger).

Cargo area.

Canteens and a butterfly net, waiting for their next trip out into the jungle. (And yes, that's a toy tiger. The Jungle Cruise visits Asia, Africa, and South America. Since Disney didn't assign a specific location to the boathouse, neither will I.)

 "Jungle Chess", with tiny paper "feathers" denoting which pieces are whose. Again, this room is MUCH bigger in real life and the space under the stairs is staged with enough supplies for a safari.

A glimpse upstairs.

Familiar faces and a few nods to other Disney attractions and films.

The removable infirmary, shown from the back.

The "Jungle Radio" office. Albert must have stepped out...

A peek at the tower's removable back wall. Disney park visitors just might recognize the four macaws from a different Adventureland attraction.

Wake up, José! (And stop calling me señorita!)

A wider view showing more of the upstairs layout. Oh, did I mention the tower roof is also removable?

This is a very cluttered study in real life. I had to pare it down a bit due to the smaller footprint.

I have absolutely no idea what, if anything, is in the tower's top room in real life. So I decided a daring lady explorer, Dr. Victoria Falls, lives on site and works as a skipper to finance her own expeditions. (This was before Disney announced the Skipper Canteen, managed by Alberta Falls. Which is an inside joke: skippers love to quip that Schweitzer Falls was named for "Dr. Albert, uh, Falls." The pictures on the wall, incidentally, are of Dr. Schweitzer and Dr. Livingstone. I guess I could say Victoria is Alberta's cousin...)

Another view of the radio office.

The dispatch desk. I sneaked in references to three Pixar movies, a Disney Princess, and a menu from Trader Sam's Enchanted Tiki Bar (which is at the Disneyland Hotel, but inspired by the Jungle Cruise).

A closer look at the back wall, with three separate references to Disney's Animal Kingdom.

I flipped the infirmary around for a better view. Anyone know a good source for inexpensive miniature bottles that are tiny enough to fit into a vintage House of Miniatures closed cabinet top? Lowest 1/12 scale shelves ever...

 And now, the most dangerous part of our journey - the return to civilization and the California freeways! If you enjoyed your voyage, my name is Anna K. and this has been my Undersized Urbanite entry; if you didn't, my name is Becky and this has been Storybook Land ;)

Hard at Work on the Boathouse

I know, I know...a month since my last update. Rest assured that I have been making good use of what spare time I do have, since I do need to get this done by the deadline!

First up: making a caved-in section of roof with a lot of deferred maintenance. (I will NOT be miniaturizing the animatronic snake that I seem to recall hanging from the rafters back in the mid-'90s.)

Back view of the roof construction. Since the rafters are visible in this part of the boathouse in real life, a solid roof wouldn't do here.

Close-up, shot from below.

Staging furniture and props in one of the tower rooms. Have I mentioned that the shutters really work? (I won't be opening and closing them much - it was very difficult to install these, so I don't want to risk them popping out of place.)

Under the new roof section.

This is a Fastpass distribution space in real life, so I'm re-purposing it as a cargo storage room. I made the crates from wooden blocks and strip wood.

Oh my - what could this be? More details to come...

Not-So-Little Boathouse News

They're at it again...Van Eaton Galleries is having another Disneyland auction.

Just like last year, there are so many great things in the auction catalogue, but if you're reading this blog for the Jungle Cruise boathouse updates, pages 194-195 are well worth a glance.

The Disneyland Hotel installed the Safari Adventure remote control boats in 1999. It closed in 2010 due to extensive renovation of the hotel property. I still fondly remember getting lost at Downtown Disney with a friend, accidentally walking into the hotel's pool area, and stumbling upon a sparkling pond with tiny jungle boats. We looked at each other, wordlessly started digging in our wallets, and immediately used up a week's worth of laundry money playing with those boats. Ahh, good times.

Anyway...the Safari Adventure prop boathouse is going to be part of the auction. Also available: the "burning" boat (which would "catch fire" if you steered your boat to a certain spot), the fire department raft (the "burning" boat would be extinguished by a tiny elephant), and one of the original remote control boats.

These items are just begging to be installed in and around a Disney fanatic's backyard koi pond. Alas, they are far beyond my budget (the lower estimate for the boathouse is about 20 times my budget), I definitely do not have enough space (the SA boathouse is mounted on a 7-foot-long, 4-foot-wide base), and I don't have enough mechanical know-how to make them operational again.

So, work continues on my considerably more modest version of the boathouse.

Carved posts and delicate railings are slowly being installed. NOW this looks like a late-Victorian-era structure! I need to make more shutters, but the 6 that have already been installed really work.

View from the back. Remember, that tower wall with the door on it comes off for access to the interior rooms. (The real-life door is a much plainer style and next to a window, but I had to shrink the tower down too much to do both. With so much of the tower visible, I also thought it made more sense to make the door stylistically more consistent with the other walls.)

Two room interiors to finish. Then the hard part begins: removable railings, a (hopefully) removable infirmary, a caved-in roof, and a canopy over the stairwell. I've certainly got my work cut out for me!

Quick vignette

A friend asked about my progress on the boathouse, so I threw together a quick vignette in the first sort-of-finished interior room.

I still have to install the window shutters (and make the removable roof for the ticket office), but I think you'll get the idea. (The "view" is a rendering of the Indiana Jones Adventure - which is next to the boathouse in real life - from my D23 calendar. I didn't have any good pictures of Adventureland on hand.)

Rusty Roof

The exact location of the Jungle Cruise boathouse is somewhat vague (the Jungle Cruise itself carries guests through scenes from Cambodia, India, Africa, and the Amazon rainforest), but jungles are wet, humid places.

The boathouse, as one might expect of a building that is supposed to have stood in a steamy jungle since 1911, has a rusty corrugated tin roof.

I used plastic tin roof sheeting, mostly for safety reasons (two more roof sections will have to be added later). I had aluminum paint on hand, so I gave the shingles two coats to make the plastic look more convincing.

Then, it was time to add some rust. I'd heard good things about Dr. Ben's Scale Consortium, a line of realistic tints, stains, and pigments created for model railroads. Since so many model railroad products are plastic, I figured they would work on the plastic roofing. 

The accompanying booklet recommended dampening the surface with rubbing alcohol, then adding the solution. I tested this method but thought a random-rust-bloom look would be more realistic for 1/12 scale. So, I poured some of Dr. Ben's Realistic Rust weathering solution into an atomizer and got to work. 

Main roof section from the front. 

Tower top. I think it needs a little more rust.

Main section from the back.

The Dr. Ben's products work VERY well (I will be using a few more in other spots), but do note that they can be a little messy (tape off and cover up anything you don't want stained/weathered) and can be tricky to clean up. There are some rather messy stains in a spot that will, thankfully, be covered by flooring.

I'm working on the next task, but it's very time-consuming, so please be patient with me.

All The Cool Dollhouses Have Removable Walls

Kidding...but I'm not the only dollhouse builder incorporating removable pieces into her current build. Brae is doing a sliding wall for Milo Valley Farm (she also put removable walls in the Aero Squadron Lounge and the Newport). Muriellisa has already built a removable wall for her miniature Petit Trianon (go look - it's absolutely gorgeous!).

While considering how to build the boathouse, I knew I'd have to make a few parts of the structure removable.

I couldn't very well leave one side of the boathouse's tower open - it wouldn't look right. So, I made one wall removable, and left the tower top removable to enable removing the back tower wall.

Now you see them...

...now you don't!

(Obviously, I haven't started the interior yet. But you get the idea.)

Muriellisa is using magnets to hold her wall in place; Brae is using channel molding. Between the tower rooftop and the adjoining middle-floor roof structure, my removable wall is staying put pretty well with tension alone (if it wasn't, I'd conceal some hooks and eyes under the tower top roofline). To my complete amazement (Brae and Muriellisa are far more skilled and talented than I am), it hasn't fallen down once.

The removable wall all by itself (still need to add more trim to the top floor). It's painted differently in real life (and there is a window next to the door), but as this is a dollhouse, I didn't think it would look quite right if the design didn't match the rest of the tower.

Another part of the boathouse also called for a removable piece: the ticket office. Stuck onto the front of the boathouse next to the entry, the ticket office is supposed to be accessible through a door inside the boathouse queue (the door is locked to keep guests from tampering with the props, but you can look inside). I couldn't very well make the wall removable; it's a load-bearing wall holding up the middle floor. So instead, the ticket office will have a removable roof.

I've cut the piece for the roof, but haven't gotten around to thatching it yet. This picture should give you a pretty good idea of how I will be accessing the interior.

As always, more to come.

Roofing

I'm sure you all know roofing a dollhouse is a lot of work. This one has its own unique challenges.

In real life, the boathouse roof is made of corrugated metal shingles (perhaps the skippers had to make do with scrap pieces saved from various sources?). I wanted to use real metal (so I could get it to rust realistically), but realized it would be a good way to repeatedly cut my fingers. So I bought corrugated plastic roofing, have been cutting it into shingles (thankfully, it can be cut easily with scissors), and have some ideas for making it all look like rusty old metal.

Here, you can see back and front views of the main roof section and the tower top being shingled. (The tower top is removable because the tower's back wall is also removable, which I'll discuss in further detail in a later post. If I attached the tower top, its overhang would prevent removing the wall.) 

Two other sections of roof, which I haven't started yet, are going to be quite a bit more complicated.

Disneyland. Jungle Cruise. Gotta do it.

Like a lot of Southern Californians, I have been to Disneyland many, many times. One of my favorite places in the park is the Jungle Cruise queue, built to resemble a ramshackle outpost/boathouse in an exotic jungle (full story here).

To me, the boathouse has always felt like walking through a life-size dollhouse. From front to back, it isn't that deep (Disneyland's Adventureland is rather small due to its age and placement, so the current boathouse was built to fit a certain footprint, and the two-story design keeps the queue from blocking the already-congested walkway outside on busy days). The windows, for the most part, don't have glass in them but do have shutters. The back of the boathouse (which faces the jungle and is where the boats load) is largely open (for obvious reasons, there are railings). There are doorways with no doors, the fruit is definitely plastic (ironically, there are a couple of live birds in cages if you know where to look), and the crew have re-purposed items in pretty much the same way that children re-purpose small items as dollhouse furniture.

Jungle Cruise skippers are notoriously witty (some of them are brilliant comedians), and many of them like to start off the eight-minute voyage by asking for a show of hands: "How many of you woke up this morning and said 'Disneyland. Jungle Cruise. Gotta do it'?"

Last summer, I did exactly that. Instead of going there in person, I decided my next build was going to be a dollhouse version of the Jungle Cruise boathouse. 

Obviously, I have a LONG way to go on this build. But, with the outside painted, it's at least somewhat recognizable.

I hasten to add (for the benefit of Disney purists) that this is NOT an exact copy. If it were, the base would be too big to fit on my work table, the additional materials required would blow the budget, and due to the unique structural challenges of building in miniature, certain areas of the boathouse wouldn't be stable. Add to that the fact that I am not a carpenter in the first place, and in a nutshell, I have to take some liberties (which I'll detail in a future post). I'm aiming for the overall feel of the boathouse, not perfection.

Expect progress to be slow - I'm going to have to make the shutters, some of the railings, and most of the props myself. And although I didn't include the adjoining Tropical Imports shop, I've left enough space to build it later (I'm still not sure I will, since the merchandise consists mostly of bottled drinks, packaged snacks, and rubber snakes...).

P.S. There was an auction of vintage Disneyland items in Los Angeles a couple of months ago. I wasn't able to attend, but was thrilled to see that the very first item listed in the auction catalog (see page 13) was one of the miniature potbellied stoves Walt Disney made and hand-painted himself (if you've missed certain previous posts, Walt collected, and occasionally made, miniatures).