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!