Rowhouse porch (part deux)

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 a piece of 5/16″ square strip wood, and cut four 1″ lengths. For finials on top, I perused the well-stocked spindle/turnings aisle at Dollhouses, Trains, and More and picked out a package of Shenandoah 3/4″ spindles. Can’t find them online so I have no idea if they’re even made anymore (if yes, they’d be Houseworks brand since Houseworks acquired Shenandoah a while back), but they’re similar to these.

Rather than cut down the spindles to give them flat bottoms, I thought it would be more stable to drill holes in the posts and glue the spindles into the holes. Geoff helped with this, using his drill press.

Here’s the basic idea. (These spindles would make good bowling pins, too!)

I painted the posts with Baked Scone, and used Mossy Green on the spindles and a skinny piece of strip wood to use as trim around the tops of the posts.

Initially I only planned to paint the trim, but after gluing it on I realized it would look better to paint the whole top of the post green, too. This would have been easier if I’d painted the tops before gluing in the spindles, but why do it the easy way when you can do it the hard way?!

After the first coat, I used a tiny amount of watered down wood filler to fill in the cracks where the trim met the post, then painted another coat of Mossy Green.

Once painted, I lined them up with the posts underneath, and added Laser Tech porch trim painted with Olivewood. This trim is intended for 1:12 scale (to be used under the porch roof, I guess) but at 7/8″ high it’s just the right size for my porch roof railing.

Even though the porch trim is designed for 1:12 scale and the grilles I used are for 1:24 scale, they’re the same brand, and the porch trim nicely echoes the white trim at the edges of the grille. I also bought matching corner trim to use as apex trim, but haven’t painted it yet (hopefully it won’t compete too much with the resin trim behind it).

And here’s the finished porch! It was pricey, with the materials coming in at about $50 (not including the $34 door!), but I’m so happy with it and don’t regret spending the money at all.

A note about the painted resin trim: after tearing off my uncentered first attempt, I did redo this trim so there would be a flower centered on the porch. However, since the grille is set back from the edge of the porch by about half an inch, perspective causes it to look off center unless you’re looking directly at it. So in all of these pictures, the trim still looks off—but it’s not, I swear!

In the photo above, the dots on either side of the door are holes I drilled to run the porch light wires through. I’m still waiting for some lights to show up in the mail, but electrifying will be one of my next projects.

Last but not least, I used the trim I ripped off the porch due to lack of centering (plus some new pieces) to spruce up the roof on the kitchen bay window. Pretty!