Rosedale dry fit (part 2)

And now… part 2 of the great Rosedale dry fit adventure! Last time I got the first and second floors mostly figured out. Before moving onto the third floor, I decided to add a porch door to one of the small rooms on the second floor, to access the balcony. I thought about bashing the front door from Kit B to make it a porch door, but for simplicity’s sake picked out a Houseworks Victorian oval door instead.

The oval opening matches nicely with the Rosedale’s oval windows, but the door is slightly too tall, and the peaked pediment doesn’t really go with the window and door trim on the rest of the house. As luck would have it, both of the oval doors the miniature shop had in stock were damaged, with the pediment split away from the door frame. Seeing this gave me the idea to remove the pediment completely.

Removing the pediment made it just the right height. I cut a hole for the door using the doorway on the opposite wall as a guide. The Houseworks door is slightly wider than the Rosedale’s doorways, but at least both doors are the same distance from the back edge of the house.

Next I took the front wall from Kit B and cut off the top half. This will be attached to the front wall from Kit A to create the third story.

With the front wall added, here’s what we have so far…

This has all been fairly straightforward… I’m basically just mirroring the left side of the house on the right. The roof is a bit more complicated since I’m not only adding a mirror image to the right side, but also taking a roof that’s supposed to be all one height and raising up the middle portion.

The trim that goes around the bottom of the roof is built into the piece I wanted to use for the third floor. I needed to keep the trim on the left side (where the left roof would be) but remove it from the right side (where the floor butts up against the new front wall).

In the original design, the smaller part of the roof meets the larger part at a sloped angle. Since I’m extending the middle part, I will need to add a side wall here and cut the roof piece so it meets the wall at a 90-degree angle instead. Haven’t tackled that yet! I think I’m going to be able to use the house’s original right wall, which so far hasn’t been used from either kit.

Here’s the inside view. I still need to cut a hole in this floor piece to accommodate the new stairway. I’ll wait until my sweetie can help me with the power tools; I don’t think my little hand saw is going to cut it (no pun intended).

Next I took this same floor piece from Kit B and cut off the small part to use as the third floor on the other wing. The big part will be the third story ceiling / attic floor.

Normally the small roof and big roof would have been right next to each other, so the trim at the top doesn’t go all the way around. I’ll use the trim piece I removed from Kit A’s third floor to complete it.

With the roof pieces (mostly) figured out, it’s almost time to start gluing! First I’m trying to decide if I should add the leftover bay window to the second story. Adding it will provide some needed space in the TV room, but it will also compromise the structure a bit since it means cutting the front wall (which is one of the only big, stable parts of this house!) into two pieces.

I’m sure I can figure out how to deal with that, though. My main concern is that I don’t want the house to look unbalanced.

Any opinions? I can’t decide which looks better.