One of the first components I splurged on for this house was a Bespaq Newport double door for a whopping $34. Not entirely sure what my color scheme would be, I got the white one, thinking I could paint it. But then I realized the door wouldn’t easily come apart — unlike a Houseworks door, […]
Category: Dollhouses (Page 19 of 28)
Okay, they’re not hallways exactly, but the Queen Anne Rowhouse has two rooms that are dominated by stairs. If I’d built this house myself I would have left out the wall between the “stair room” and the “bay window room” on one or both floors. But it came with walls snugly in, so I decided […]
Moving right along with the rowhouse living room and office. Here’s the French door downstairs. For the headers, I haven’t been too careful about making sure they’re consistently wide. This one’s almost too short… I glued the door in before I cut it, so just had to wing it. In retrospect I probably should have […]
I’m running out of creative titles for these blog posts. This one is (mostly) about wallpapering / flooring / trim in the living room and office, which are the two rooms with bay windows. Hence the mildly clever title. You’ve been warned. Okay, living room first. I didn’t like the arched doorway cut into the […]
I bought another light to fix the one with the broken wire. Since I’d already finished the floor above, I needed to come up with another way to hide the wire. I had an idea to glue the ceiling paper to a piece of thin cardboard, pull the wire up through the cardboard, and then […]
About a month ago, I started working on wainscot and flooring in the rowhouse attic. I actually made good progress with it that very weekend, but then hit some unexpected snags that have only now been unraveled. Once again, electricity has proven to be my nemesis. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The stain I’m […]
After my huge struggle to get the rowhouse attic wallpapered, I was disheartened when I returned to the house a few weeks later to find that the glue had discolored my white paper. I’m not sure why this happened but am willing to blame it on the fact that I printed my own wallpaper… it’s […]
A couple of weeks ago I saw something odd on eBay and, well, I had to have it. It’s a half scale cottage (I think named the Gull Bay) that seems to have come from a 1980s class taught by Jackie Kerr Deiber. The shell is already sided and assembled and it came with everything […]
I just participated in my first mini swap, which combines the fun of getting chain letters in the mail (remember those?) with the fun of scoring a bunch of free minis. The swap was done by the Yahoo Half Scale group and there were 46(!) participants, meaning we each had to provide 46 of an […]
Work has stalled on the Queen Anne Rowhouse lately. The electricity’s still driving me crazy as I slowly install the Houseworks lights that I bought to replace the Cir-Kit lights that broke my heart. Two weeks ago I got one into the attic but the second attic fixture was broken. Not sure what the problem […]
I knew all along that getting stairs into the Queen Anne rowhouse would be a challenge. The stair holes were positioned in a place that wouldn’t fit a regular straight staircase. The original kit may have come with stairs that turned a corner, and apparently Houseworks used to sell stairs like these because I’ve seen […]
Haven’t had much time for mini-ing lately, but this week I finished a petitpoint carpet and a few weeks ago Geoff helped me cut some wood to make ceilings and knee walls for the rowhouse’s attic rooms, so here’s a hodgepodge of pictures for all of my restless readers. The Queen Anne rowhouse has two […]
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I made a chimney for the Queen Anne Rowhouse. Well, most of a chimney. I’m getting ready to shingle the roof, so I finally got around to making a top part of the chimney to go with the bottom. I started by cutting two pieces […]
I keep adding doodads and curlicues to the front of the Queen Anne Rowhouse. It’s like an obsession. After I added the panels and resin trim to the bay window, the house felt kind of unbalanced, with too many dark green stripes at the bottom and none at the top. I rectified this by adding […]
When we last saw the Queen Anne Rowhouse, she was wearing a big green stripe that wasn’t exactly flattering. (You know what they say about horizontal stripes…) Today I turned this into three self-contained panels. This was a simple matter of cutting a few more vertical trim pieces, and cutting the corners of the horizontal […]
While I’m waiting for my new lights to arrive, I’ve gone back to work on the front of the rowhouse. I want this to look more or less like a San Francisco painted lady, and at the beginning of this project I spent a lot of time poring over library books to get ideas for […]
Progress on the Queen Anne Rowhouse has been somewhat stymied by one disaster after another with the electricity. On October 3, I ordered eleven half scale lights from Swan House DIY for a cost of about $130. (They didn’t show up until Halloween, but that’s a story for another time.) Of these, four were Houseworks […]
Now and then, the Dollar Tree has furniture that’s roughly 1:12 scale. (Except for beds, which for some reason are closer to half scale.) It usually comes in an ugly red finish, but recently they started carrying raw wood furniture too. I picked up a few pieces today: two dressers and a sideboard. For something […]
For the past month I have been struggling with electrifying the Queen Anne rowhouse. I’ll write up a blog about everything that’s gone wrong (and hopefully save some others out there the heartache I’ve experienced with a certain brand of light fixtures…) but I’m so annoyed about it right now I don’t even want to […]
With the downstairs part of the porch finished, I moved on to the top. I wanted to turn this into a balcony, but with something more flamboyant than the usual newel post. This is one of those times that a dearth of half scale supplies caused me to get creative. For the posts, I bought […]