Knitty Gritty 2 and doors

I finished the second Knitty Gritty project a few days ago.  It was a pair of baby booties.  I used some left over Berrocco Vintage pink yarn from my stash. 

I have also been lucky enough to have some chunks of time to work on my dollhouse.  I finally figured out how to cut my last sheet of flooring to fit the two remaining upstairs rooms.  I've been mulling it over for several weeks.  When I figured it out I exhaled and did a little happy brain dance.  This in spite of the fact that the hardwood strips keep popping up.  I don't know if that is just the nature of this kind of flooring or if it has something to do with the fact that it has been sitting in a box for more than a decade.  I ironed them down but they just keep popping up.  So I am just going to label it character.  This house has character.

Small upstairs room

After all that, I decided I should glue the doors in before the flooring. I got some help assembling the doors tonight.  They are held in the doorframes by pins. Ideally the doors would open all the way.  But to get them to do that I would need more space on the sides of the door.  I wasn't sure how much of a gap to leave and thought if it was too big it wouldn't look realistic.  So now the doors can only be opened a crack.  More character.  I hear old houses have a lot of that.  I painted one door and set it in place, along with the flooring, to get a preview of what the room will look like.  It's exciting to see it coming together!

Master bedroom

 

Paint and Windows

I have been busy with paint and glue lately.  I painted the house, a few windows and two doors  (the back door and the French doors).  I also started adding siding to the porch.

While I was doing that, the kids were busy making a dog house.

 

House and dog house.  Must belong to Clifford the Big Red Dog.

 

Bricks and Siding

I haven't posted in a few days because we were getting ready to go camping (and then were actually camping).

So let's see, what have I done since my last post?  I cut some scrapbook paper to wallpaper another bedroom and taped it to the wall.  I am having a hard time committing to wallpaper.  It feels so permanent.  What if a year from now I decide I hate it?  I will have to pull off all the moldings and the paper, which may or may not want to come off!  Or what if I decide it's really dated?  Of course, this whole house is going to be really dated at some point.  Hopefully, that will be part of it's charm.  Anyway, here is what I have.

I'm not sure if I will make that room into a bedroom actually.  I looked at the original house plans and then at the NN plans and it seems a good scale foot or so has been omitted from the width.  This makes an already small room pretty teeny.  It is only 7' wide if you don't count the alcove.  What else could it be?  A laundry room?  A play room?  A craft room?  A cat room?

Additionally, I have been gluing siding on.  I finished one whole wall of the house and bricked the porch foundation.  WooHoo!  Let me tell you, I was terrified to start cutting that siding for fear I would screw up again.  I finally made it to the dollhouse store last week to get more siding and it is not cheap.  Trying to cut the siding around where the porch was supposed to go made it worse.  I finally decided the porch was added on later and so that whole wall could be sided.  In looking through the plan to find out what they put on the porch roof I realized we had overlooked something major.  The porch was supposed to be glued to the house and the front wall was supposed to be removable and pressure fit. Oh well.  We made the whole porch removable!  I also realized the plans don't tell you how to make the front and back steps.  I saw that someone had sold this same dollhouse on ebay and theirs didn't have any steps, just a door hanging off the wall.  This just might be why.

Lolly helped me brick the foundation and she painted the interior porch walls.

Wallpaper, Flooring, and a Table

Over the past week I've been working on several things.  I had a rectangular piece of hardwood flooring leftover from the downstairs.  It was too short for any of the upstairs rooms, but seemed to actually be enough to cover a small floor.  I pulled it all off the paper backing and rearranged it onto a piece of paper cut to match the floor.  Then I wallpapered that same room.   It took me forever to decide on wallpaper!  I didn't like any of the commercially made wallpaper. I looked at scrapbook paper but the patterns were too large.  I looked at free digital scrapbook paper and found a few but couldn't figure out how to download them.  I found this floral from jennifersprintables.  I feel it has that vintage/cottage feeling I was going for and is the right colors, so there you go!

I also made a farmhouse table for the dining room.  What do you think?



1 Step Forward, 2 Steps Back

This past week has been a very frustrating week in dollhouse world, what with walls coming apart and siding going on upside down.  I feel like every time I take one step forward, I am set back by two.  I cut the siding for the back wall and glued it on this past weekend.  I was so excited to have another part done!

 

Then I looked at it from the side and realized the wood had warped! NOOO!  So do I redo the whole wall, or plant a tree there?  Hmm.

While I have been working on all of that, I have been trying to figure out the wall colors for the second floor and whether to paint or wallpaper.  I am also trying to figure out the flooring.  Apparently, there was a miscalculation  that resulted in a hardwood flooring shortage. I had one sheet I bought ages ago.  I had no idea who made it or what the stain was so I could order more.  Unfortunately, the new flooring I ordered and installed in the downstairs doesn't quite match, but it might be ok.  However, even if I use that I will not have enough for the hallway and one of the bedrooms.

Painting and a surprise

Yesterday, I painted the hallway even though I am not sure how much of it will be visible.  In case you are curious about my color choice, it was cream!  I have been a little stuck for the past several weeks trying to decide how to decorate the second floor. After painting the hallway and spending oodles of time on Pinterest, I came up with a little clearer idea.  What is it, you ask?  Well you will just have to wait and see....  What I will tell you now is that I painted the master bedroom cream.  I know, there's a whole lot of cream going on in this house right now.  I still am not sure what to do with the room next to the master bedroom.  After putting in the walls I realized how tiny it is!  It was going to be a bedroom, but now I'm not so sure.  And to think, this minature house is based on the dimensions of a true life-sized house that people built and lived in!  And that room was a bedroom!

While I was off trying to figure all that out, some little sweetheart left me a surprise.

Second floor

Over the weekend I spent a good amount of time priming and sanding the second floor walls.  And then my sweet husband helped me glue them all together because I wanted them square and he knows how to get the job done!

It's a good thing the landing is completely enclosed. 
Now you can't see that I made the stairs too high!

Yesterday, while I was unknowingly gluing the siding upside down onto the front panel of the house, some little people moved into the house!

When it's too hot to cook inside, move the kitchen outside!

 

Looks like some lucky person is going to get breakfast in bed.

 

I wonder what these girls are talking about.

Doors and More Doors

Well for the past couple of weeks I've been making doors, doors, doors.  Unfortunately, I forgot how I made the kitchen door so I had to figure it out again. Here's what I did.

The DOOR FRAME was cut from 3/16" thick basswood. I cut my pieces 3/8"W because that is the depth of my walls.  The top and bottom pieces are 1 5/16" long.  The sides are 3 3/8" long.  I glued it together and laid it on my cutting grid to see if it was square.

The DOOR pieces were cut from1/32" basswood.  Here are the pieces I cut for one door:
1 door base: 1 5/16"W x 3 6/32" H
4 vertical pieces (2 for each side of the door): 5/32" W x 3 6/32" H
10 horizontal pieces (5/side): 5/32" W x 15/16" L. You will need 2 more for the bottom strips but I waited to cut those until everything else was glued in.  That way if I needed to adjust the width I could.  Not that all my other measurements and cuts weren't always spot-on.  Ahem.
10 panels (5/side): 15/16" H x 7/16" D.  I sanded the edges of these by holding each side of the panel at an angle and sanding it down on an old nail file.

Done!  Now flip it over and repeat on the other side.
 

5 doors and door frames ready for installation.  Well, almost.  They just need to be painted.  Oh, yeah - and hinged.

Floors and Stairs

After installing the flooring in the dining room and living room, I had some scraps left that really weren't going to work upstairs anywhere.  I decided to use them for the kitchen instead of tiling it. The printed paper tiles just didn't look right.  I had been going around and around about this kitchen.  When I first started the house, my plan had been to make the house as historically accurate as possible.  But when I compared the dollhouse plans to the real plans in the Sears catalog, I saw the kitchen layout was totally different.  The back left wall is meant to have a doorway opening up into a closet pantry. It was under the stairs and had an exterior door on the left.  To keep it accurate I would have had to add that, along with a drop down ironing board next to it.  Then I would have had to glue the sink and cabinets to the removable wall.  This is only the second house I have ever made and thinking about it was making my head hurt.  I decided since it was a kit house, theoretically the family could have decided not to do any of that, and the whole kitchen could have been completely updated at some point. 

After I resolved all that, I installed the stairs in the living room and made a fireplace following Otterine's fireplace tutorial, only halving the measurements.  For my fireplace, I cut strips of wood for the sides and scribed them.  I cut a piece of wood to go along the top and notched it all along the side to create part of the dental molding.  I glued a piece of cove molding on top of that.  For the circle pattern in the corner blocks I used a spring hammer from an eyelet setting kit.

Fireplace close up

Rethinking the floors

After I finished the bricks, I redid the floors.  I was really unhappy with them.  There were big gaps where I had fit the sheets of basswood together.  I ended up ripping it all out and ordering real dollhouse flooring.

Dining room floor before

 

Dining room floor after

I was really happy with the floors after I had them installed.  In retrospect, I think the original floors would have been fine if I had laid them with the boards going sideways and had left off the shellac...  

1/2" Scale Lamp

I know it seems like I am cruising along on this house, but the reality is, I started working on this house last April.  I want to post everything I've done on the house, so at for the time being my posts are rather like flashbacks.

Last fall, I signed up for a swap to celebrate the anniversary of the half scale yahoo group I am on.  I have never signed up for a swap before. I was really excited about it!  After everyone was signed up, I found myself committed to making 47 shabby chic minis!  Yikes!  I wracked my brains and spent a lot of time on Pinterest for several weeks trying to come up with an idea.  I finally came up with an idea and a prototype.

The base is made up of a jewelry finding with crystals and a bead glued on top.  I cut the lampshade out of paper and glued white fabric to it.  The flowers are French knots.  It took me several months to complete all 47.  A lot of that time was spent hitting every craft store in town trying to find enough of the base parts to do all the lamps!

Bricking the Puritan

I started creating bricks for the foundation of the Puritan following  George the Mini guy's brick tutorial.  His bricks look awesome!  I think mine look pretty good considering I've never made anything like that before.

A tub full of bricks

  I made a few mistakes I need to make note of in case I ever decide I want to handcut another 500+ miniature bricks.  I cut all the brick measurements in half, but was not thinking about needing to use a thinner board too.  As a result, I had a really difficult time keeping my x-acto knife perpendicular while cutting all the way through those teensy, tiny bricks.  Between that and my not completely spot-on measuring, my bricks came out a little wonky looking.  I painted the sides of the bricks gray instead of adding grout.

It took a LOOOONG time to make all those bricks.  When I finally got them all done, I was ready to have a party.  A gluing party!  I was so excited to get them on the house and see how it looked all together.

Close up of bricks

The Puritan after adding the bricks