The Walls Are Going Up

It was a three-day weekend for me this past weekend, so I got a lot done mini-wise.  First of all, I finally got all my swaps done, and they are on their way to the swap organizer.  Yay!  So nice to have that off my to-do list.  Second, I got the first-floor walls (the ones that get glued down anyway) primed, sanded and up.

I didn't take pictures of all the clamping and weighting as I glued them in, but I did take pictures of doing the curved wall.

For that wall, I used 1/16"-thick matboard.  To prep it for curving, I scored it vertically at roughly 1/8" intervals for its entire width.  The scoring went fairly deep, but not all the way through the matboard.  Before I started, I had marked it at 2" intervals to ensure that I wasn't going too crooked with my scoring.  I also took a break from scoring every so often and gently worked on opening up the "ribs" I had made so that they would curve properly.  When it was completely scored and opened, I wrapped it around a bottle of Aleene's glue to train it.  Once I had it curving the way I wanted it to, I cut out the window.  I discovered when doing the mock-up that it was much harder to get my wall to curve properly once I had removed that large section for the window, so it's curve, then cut.  Here it is fully scored with the window partially cut out.

I then wrapped it around the curved section of the floor and glued it down.  The piece above the window got a bit wibbly as I was fixing it in place, so I cut a temporary half disk and wedged it in to encourage the proper curvature.

Next I cut and curled medium-weight cardstock (again, training it around an Aleene's bottle), removed the window section, and glued it in place.  You can see I needed to trim a little bit around the top after gluing.  The good thing is that gluing the cardstock to the matboard strengthened the upper curve, and I no longer need my temporary ceiling form.

It's reassuring that the foam-core mock-up fits on top. 😊

 

My intention is to skim coat the exterior with spackle, sand a bit and then paint, to give it more of a stucco texture.  I don't want the exterior too rough, but I also don’t want it to look like wood.  I may put my ceiling form back in place while doing this.

Before gluing in the walls, I cut a groove for my floor lamp, the one non-ceiling fixture I intend to have.  No more tape wire—round wire all the way!  The lamp is made from a kit by Jane Harrop.  She had provided a wood strip for the pole; I replaced it with hollow metal tubing so that I could run a grain-of-rice bulb through it.  I tried several options for the shades:

  

The first is the original shade that came with the kit.  Fine, but blah.  The second was a similar shade with fringe.  Um, no.  I then found some patterns for stained glass shades online.  Most of the ones labeled Art Deco looked more Prairie to me, but art deco did have some of its roots in the designs of Frank Lloyd Wright.  I tried coloring in the dragon-fly lamp by hand; that didn't work too well, and I wasn't thrilled with its look in the room.  I used Word's shapes to color in more geometric lamp shades.  On the first one I tried for a gold-and-silver look.  It didn't look all that gold when printed out, and I didn't like how narrow the top was.  I modified the design a bit and replaced the "gold" with mauve. I think that's the one I'll go with.  Currently, it's just printed on paper, but I'll be printing it out on vellum for a more translucent look.

Finally, I tried out some options for the walls.  These are some scrapbook papers:  The one on the fireplace wall has a pearl-like embossed finish that I thought looked very art deco with its concentric diamonds. I also like the mauve metallic color, but it might too much for the entire room.

I do like the mauve in the piano alcove.

I looked for art deco wallpaper borders and found this fabulous one that apparently was a Bradbury & Bradbury product, although I can no longer find it on their Web site.  (P.S. for 1:12 scalers:  For those who don't already know it, Bradbury & Bradbury sells many of its wallpapers in miniature, which I think is a marvelous idea.  I wish more wallpaper designers did, and I wish B&B offered theirs in half scale.)  (Ooh, that reminds me of another aside:  Have any of you been following the House Beautiful "Dollhouse Beautiful" challenge, annoying though it may be at times?  Did anyone notice that one of the designers apparently got Kohler to make bathroom fixtures in 1:12 scale just for her?  Whaaaat?  How do the rest of us get that?)

Getting back to the border, it wasn't the right colorway, anyway, so I created my own version using shapes in Word.  This allows me to use whatever colors I want and tweak them at my whim.  I think this design could work in conjunction with one or both of the wallpapers above.  What do you think?  Ideas? Suggestions?  (And, yes, those of you who encouraged me to keep the purple chair fabric, or at least wait before making any decisions—I'm very glad I did. 😊)

Enjoy the week and all the mini time you can get!  Your comments are always welcome and appreciated!

Tiling the Ground Floor

This past week, I was busy tiling the ground floor in the deco house.  I have always wanted to try the tiles from dollhouse_flooring.com, and I finally had the opportunity for this build.  I chose the black-and-white "Marlike" tiles; this seems like a slightly more elegant house (I like Carrie's idea that a Hollywood starlet lives here), and I liked the look of the "marble" tiles.  In addition to his stand-alone Web site, he also has an Etsy store.  Because my mother had given me a generous Etsy card for Christmas, I purchased on Etsy, ordering two of his "diamond" packs and two packs of the regular ½" squares.  The diamond packs come with additional triangles (half squares and quarter squares) for laying out a diamond design.  The tiles are very well made, and I was extremely pleased with them.  While I do have some left-over tile, I used all or part of every pack.

I quickly determined that there was no layout that wouldn't require cutting some tile.  *sigh*  So I decided that the most important thing would be to have clean edges on the sides that open.  Those are the edges that will actually be seen, and I figured that any wonky or imperfect cuts on the enclosed wall sides could be hidden by baseboard (I hope).  There are two open sides—the front, which opens onto the living room, and the left side, which opens onto the kitchen and dining room.  Because the flooring has to flow throughout the entire ground floor, I had to be strategic in the layout of my tile.  Unfortunately, I didn't take pictures of my process, so I have made some graphical representations of what I did.  They don't match my floor exactly, but you'll get the gist.

I started by using some double-sided tape to stick down a few tiles along the front (living room) edge.  I laid out enough tiles to reach just above the groove for the left wall.  I obviously couldn't glue them down because their positions would likely move, but the double-sided tape held them in place.  I then measured to the tip of my top tile.  I marked that distance in a couple of other spots along the front, then used my 18" ruler to draw a line through my marks all the way from one side of the floor to the other.

 Next, I removed my tile and tape, and starting gluing down tile from the left edge.  I made sure the tip of my first (white) half tile was on the line, and that the top and bottom tips of my black tiles were also on the line.

I continued laying tile from left to right, making sure that the tips of my black tiles stayed on the line.

Once I got beyond the left wall groove, I also started filling in toward the front edge.  I figured if anything wasn't quite right and I had to pop loose some tiles, the fewer the better. 😊

When I had made it all the way across, I filled in the lower left side.  It may look like there is a clean edge at the bottom of the left side, but in fact I had to trim the bottom edges of the half tiles just a bit, and I will likely sand or file the tips of the white tiles to ensure that the wall can fit flush against the base.  Then it was just laying and cutting and laying some more.  It felt like doing a jigsaw puzzle.

Cutting the tiles is not easy.  Scissors or other shears don't work because they crack the top of the tile, and it takes several passes with a utility knife to get through those little suckers.  When I got  to the rounded edge, I looked at all those curved little bits and slivers I would have to cut and wondered whatever had possessed me to try to do a floor like this.  If only I had tiles that were easier to cut!   I decided to experiment.

I took a photo of a tile, sized it to ½ inch, and made several duplicates of the image.  I then printed them out on double-sided matte presentation paper (which is the thickness of card stock), using my printer's "best" setting.  It took some fiddling with the image settings to get the variations in the "marble" to show up properly.  My white tile isn't exactly right, but it's pretty close and not obviously different once laid.  Using some heavy-duty glue stick, I glued the printouts to some thin chipboard.  The thickness of the double-sided presentation paper and the chipboard together were pretty darn close to the thickness of the tile.  After giving them four coats of clear gloss nail polish, I decided I had something I could work with.  I wouldn't use my fake tiles on the main part of the floor, but they work fine along the rounded edge, which won't be that visible and will be partially covered by baseboard anyway.  The most important thing is, they are easy to cut!

And here is the finished floor, which took way longer than I had expected, but I am pleased with it.  Now I'm ready to start on the walls.

On a side note, while I was doing one of my searches of the Internet for art deco inspiration, I came across this:

https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/03/21/vita-sackville-west-a-note-of-explanation-queen-marys-dollhouse/  I am not sure what enchants me most:  the fact that the book was originally created as a miniature volume for Queen Mary's dollhouse; the fact that the story is about an elegant sprite who takes up residence in Queen Mary's dollhouse; or the charming period illustrations that, to a very large extent, evoke my conception of the inhabitant of the deco house. I think deep down I'd love it if the sprite came to live in my house.     😉

Have a great week!  The days (in this hemisphere) are finally getting noticeably longer, and I enjoy every extra minute of daylight.  Thanks for stopping by!

The Wood Has Arrived!

When last I wrote, I was thinking about getting the walls for my house laser cut, and I ended up doing just that.  I had gotten some laser-cut circles for the roof of the house from Dennis at FatDance on eBay.  Some of the circles were custom, and I was impressed with both the quality of the wood and the precision of his cutting, so I asked whether he could do the walls.  He said he could, and he even let me send all my specification in a Word file.  That meant he got some 15 pages that looked like this:

All the designs were built using "shapes" in Word, and the shapes were both the exact dimensions I wanted and labeled with their dimensions.  These were what I used to cut the foamcore, but I did have to label (and clean up) all the pieces.  I had done a bit of eyeballing on some of my window placements, and they all needed to be evened up.  Dennis then translated all of this into the software he needed to use to cut the wood.  He even caught a typo on my part.  One window shape was 3" x 2½, but I had accidentally labeled it 2" x 2½.  He checked with me before cutting to make sure he got the dimensions right. 

While I was waiting for the wood to arrive, I began prepping for the build.  I cut a sheet of 1/8" plywood to 17" x 12" using my table saw.  I figured I could probably handle that cut.  😊  I measured and marked where I wanted the top and side edges of the house to be.  Then I then cut out my pattern on the inside of the lines and lined it up carefully against my measurements, using double-stick tape to hold it in place.

I traced around my pattern so that I would know exactly where to lay the pieces.  It's a bit faint, but you can see it below.  I was ready for my wood!

The wood arrived two days earlier than expected, and I could not have been more thrilled.  It was neatly packaged in plastic baggies and well wrapped in bubble wrap.  Everything was exactly right.  Here is my dry fit of the first floor:

As you may be able to tell from the picture, the long back piece wants to bend a little, so it is living under a set of weight plates until I am ready to use it.

The base of the first floor was designed in pieces.  I had originally done that because I thought I would be cutting it myself, and I figured it would be easier for me than trying to make the narrow slots for the walls.  That is how I did the floor in the foamcore mock-up.  I kept this design even when I decided to go with laser-cut pieces, which is why tracing the pattern was so important.

Here you can see me gluing the pieces down.  I used the walls only as placeholders to help ensure that I got the spacing correct.

You can see that I had started painting the base but had to stop when I realized that the green paint was so dark it was covering up my lines.

Between the pieces where the floor will be, I glued 1/8" x 1/8" strip wood, checking carefully against my wall pieces.  Then I puttied and sanded, as well as finishing painting the base.

Finally, because I read on Jodi's blog that, when working with the floor tiles I had chosen, it's a good idea to paint the floor with one of the tile colors, I gave the floor a coat of paint.  The tile I've selected is a black and white "marble," but the black has a bit of gray to it, so I chose a dark gray paint for the floor.  I then sanded for a smooth surface, and the floor is ready for tiling!

In fact, I have already started tiling the floor, but more on that process in my next entry.

Have a great week!  Thanks for stopping by!