Whitebrush Manor - Walls Are Up!

Today has been a great day! I took the day as a vacation day so I could go with a friend and her kids to the pool, but one of them got sick overnight so that was cancelled. Of course I could have gone ahead and gone into work... but nah... the Manor was calling!

I wasn't in the mood to paint spindles today. I worked out super hard last night (I can't do anything halfway), so my back and legs are pretty sore and I just couldn't fathom spending all day hunched in the chair.

Much better to skitter around the floor on all fours, methinks.

Anywho, after lots of coffee and some Tylenol, I set about doing a dry-fit to be sure it'd go together without any problems.

This sucker is huge. Knowing the dimensions and seeing it taking almost all available floor space in your craft room are two different things entirely.

All the same, it went together pretty well. I also went ahead and added the third floor, just to see how the second and third level floors did when they were both installed.

The picture above also shows the partition for the kitchen in (first level, far left). These will be large rooms with oodles of space to decorate like crazy.

I was really glad I decided to do both floors because sure enough, some of the wall panels were a little warped and the third level didn't fit quite as well as the second. After a little sanding I was able to get it worked out though.

This is the view from the front (still not yet glued):

In fact, it went so smoothly I decided to take the plunge and go ahead and glue the whole thing together. I used twine and rubber bands to hold it tightly while it dried.

Surprisingly, I didn't run into any problems. Maybe because I'd done the dry run first? I'm not sure, but it was such an easy process that it's almost made me a little nervous. What did I miss?

Then I discovered one snafu:

Unfortunately, I didn't notice it until I'd glued the whole house together, so there wasn't a way to fix it the "right" way at this point. I just decided to wood glue it and tape it so it doesn't stick out as much. That's the plan, anyway. Hopefully it won't be horribly noticeable once I put a coat of paint on it and the roof is installed.

Then I just scurried from one side of the house to the other, making sure all the wood glue seeping out was wiped up before drying.

I put weights (oilfield drill bit, bowl of knobs, paint) on certain areas of the flooring to be sure they were glued firmly in place on top of the supports, and I added the floor trim end cap thingees to each of the floors.

While I was waiting for the glue to dry, I started playing around with the porch roof pieces. I'm going to have a planked porch, so I wanted to lay the pieces all out and kind of see how far along the front of the house the planked flooring will be.

The problem is that when they cut my porch roof pieces out, some of them were cut upside down. The rough part of the Masonite is supposed to be up, to give a smooth finish on the ceiling of the porch, and also to help the shingles adhere better. In the picture above, the darker pieces are smooth-side up (wrong).

What I'm planning to do is get more Masonite, trace the pieces the right way, and have Larry cut them out for me.

I'm toying with the idea of adding fancy windows like this oval one or maybe this round one to both of these gables to let in more light.

The gable above might not really work with the oval window, just because it's smaller (and the window itself is a touch over 3"), but it would look great on the gable on the side of the house because it's much larger. Of course I'd have to use the same shape on each gable, otherwise I think it'd look weird.

Another thing is that the window on the smaller front gable would just show the siding behind it when viewing it from the front. I'm not sure how I feel about that, although I really like the idea of having more light in both of the affected rooms.

Boring holes in both gables would likely cause the shingles to split too. Ideally, the window adding would've been done before the shingles had been put on, but they were done 20ish years ago. At the time there was now way to know, of course. I have no idea if it's even feasible at this point so I'll have to ask Larry if he thinks it can be done without chewing the house up completely.

I'm really sorry my friend's kid is sick (get well soon, Isaac!), but it made for a very productive dollhouse day.