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.

Roof: Part 1

Gluing the roof structure together (with a little help from Charlie Brown and Snoopy). More to come...

Starting Over...Again

For a while now, I've felt a bit burnt out on the midcentury house - I think I made the design, with multiple opening panels, a bit too complicated for my skill level. I just can't seem to get it right, and it's much more frustrating than I've let on.

So, I'm going to put it aside for now. I may come back to it in a few months, or a few years. But for now, I've begun another project (one I'm sure I can handle).

Here's a clue (and it's NOT a Tudor/medieval building!):

How I Brick a Chimney

1. Make egg-carton bricks for an earlier, and MUCH smaller project - the back of the fireplace in a room box. Realize I have neither the patience nor the coordination to make thousands of tiny identical bricks for a bigger project.

2. Decide against using individual bricks for the same reason no one ever builds an unreinforced masonry chimney in California anymore - one sharp shock and the whole thing could collapse. Build a chimney out of plywood and glue it to the house.

3. Order brick slips (Richard Stacey's, of course) from the UK.

4. Attempt to use broken brick pieces and scraps of (real) slate (saved from making the downstairs fireplace) to make a clinker-brick base. Hate it. Scrape it all off with a putty knife before the glue has a chance to dry (but save the broken brick pieces in case I ever decide to try it again).

5. Start gluing brick slips in place the regular way. 

6. Run out of brick slips two-thirds of the way through (I just HAD to use so many of them on the screened-in porch). Order new ones.

7. Open package of new brick slips and realize that, since they're from a different batch, they're a different shade of red. ARRGH!

8. Think "the hell with it" and start gluing them on anyway.

9. Quickly realize the different bricks create a subtle and believable "repair line" - such as might be seen on a 94-year-old, unreinforced chimney after earthquake damage necessitates some work on the house. (If this house existed in real life, it would have been rattled by earthquakes in 1925, 1933, 1948, 1971, 1987, 1989, 1994, 1999, and 2010...and I'm not even counting smaller quakes, which happen all the time. I have yet to live in a house built prior to 1970 that showed no evidence of earthquake damage.) Instantly love it.

10. Finish gluing on the brick slips. Allow to dry.

11. Seal brick slips with a 1:1 mix of glue and water. Allow to dry.

12. Break out the mortar and a very old, very tiny trowel that inexplicably turned up in my late grandfather's tool kit. (Pity I'll never know where he got this thing - it's awesome.)

13. Clean off excess mortar throughout the mortaring process. Continually acknowledge that I need more practice at this, since I'm not very good at it!

Next up: adding the siding. It's about time I made some progress on the exterior.

New Workspace and a Midcentury Fireplace

It took a while, but I'm finally settled in enough to resume work on the California house. Progress might be sluggish for a while because I've decided to rip out and redo a couple of things (I know, I know...but it doesn't look right yet).

Some time ago, other miniature bloggers posted pictures of their workspace. I didn't, due to the fact that at the time, I was building my French townhouse in a dark, dusty, cramped garage. Thankfully, I now have twice as much space, allowing my sunny new living room to double as a workroom.

Working on furniture placement for the second bedroom (using the master bed as a placeholder).

Some months ago, I found this tiny Malm-esque fireplace in a secondhand store. Details stamped on the base indicate it was made by Durham Industries around 1980 (the company also manufactured cast-metal Holly Hobbie miniatures), although I couldn't find any information on this piece specifically.

Malm fireplaces are still made by the same Santa Rosa-based company that created them in 1961, making this a perfect fit for a California house remodeled in 1962. It's about 1.5" wide, so it's technically 1/24th scale, but it's so cute I don't care. It was originally gold-tone, but I painted the base black (to resemble lava rock), painted the inside black, and painted the outside sky blue.

I was thrilled to discover that the pipe did, in fact, open into the fireplace proper, making it very simple to thread in a "flickering fire" LED from Evan Designs (it's much more realistic in real life).