Westville – finally

May 2015: I started the Westville as part of a Greenleaf community build in 2005, and at the time we blogged our progress on the Greenleaf forum. After a few site upgrades the old community blog has become hard to link to and I’m redoing my website anyway, so I decided to move those posts over here and backdate them. Sorry for any weirdness that results!

I got held up on the Westville because I bought a piece of plywood a few weeks ago, to make walls out of, and then didn’t get a chance to cut it. We had visitors for two weekends in a row so I only just made it to the hangar with my wood yesterday. Geoff helped me cut it down to size with his radial arm saw.

So, I now have a wall for the living room (to go up against the stairs) and also for the bedroom (to block the stair hole from the room).

Here’s what it looks like upstairs:

There will be another piece of wood at the back of the stair hole (Geoff cut it yesterday but it’s too wide right now). This will make the stairs self-contained, just like they are in many real houses. As you can see in the second picture, I am going to add a closet door to the far end of the wall in the bedroom, and the little space behind the stairs will be the closet. My parents were visiting last weekend and pointed out that once the roof is on, it’ll be hard to see the closet. So I am going to add a dormer to the bedroom roof. I was thinking of using this one, but it’s for a 45-degree roof and Judith tells me the Westville’s roof is 55 degrees. (I bought a protractor last week to check myself, but haven’t taken it out of the bag yet!) I suppose if that dormer won’t work, I can make my own out of scrap wood.

Here is the wall downstairs:

I left it sticking out of the back of the house for now, because I have to decide how far back I want it to go. I will still have a closet under the stairs, but instead of having the wall start before the end of the stairs (so some of the sloped ceiling is showing), as the original stairs and wall are, I might make this wall reach all the way to the back edge of the stairs. Once I decide, I’ll draw my pencil line and take it back to the hangar to cut.

In other news, I got a big order from Miniatures.com a few weeks ago, that includes the wallpaper for my kitchen, that telephone table for the living room that you can see in the picture above, and some other odds and ends (like a really cute kitchy cookie jar). I have been thinking about furniture layout for the living room but haven’t made any big purchases yet. I also bought a window box that will go on the kitchen window:

I’m still in the process of assembling kitchen cabinets. Here’s what I have so far:

I’ve painted the doors too, but haven’t put them on yet. They won’t open. The doors don’t open in the original kit and I don’t feel like bashing to make them work. I have done two coats of paint and will probably do one more. I have only painted one kitchen chair so far, because they’re kind of annoying to paint. I’m pacing myself. The paints you see in the living room picture above are for the backsplash.

Next to do: Paint the downstairs ceilings and the bay window trim. Once I’ve done this, I can put wallpaper up in the kitchen. When this first cabinet is done, I’ll start on the kitchen appliances (the ones in the picture above are “placeholders” from another dollhouse). Once those are done, I’ll know exactly how wide the stove is and can do the rest of the cabinets that go along that wall.