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Following the not-so-great roof experience, I made a chimney for the Artist’s Cottage and it turned out pretty well. I feel like I’ve redeemed myself. :)

The reason for the chimney, as you can see here, is that the Braxton Payne fireplace I bought extends past the roof line. Originally I thought about cutting the top of the fireplace down, but decided that cutting a hole in the roof and enclosing the visible top part with a chimney would be less likely to result in disaster. (Not to mention more realistic!)

I Googled “spanish revival chimney” and found a bunch of good pictures. The one on the right (from Houzz) is the one I kept coming back to. It seemed like it would be easy to create with basswood and moldings.

When I went to the store to buy my basswood, I forgot to bring measurements with me, so I ended up with pieces not quite wide enough that needed to be glued together.

The two long pieces go on the outside of the house.

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I recently added email alerts to the blog. If you want to get a brief, non-spammy email when I post a new blog, please sign up on the right sidebar.

I knew when I bought the scratch built gatorboard house sans roof that figuring out the roof would be the most complicated part of the build. Geometry is not my friend.

I’m planning to put barrel tile on the roof but it needs something to rest on, so I picked up a piece of “presentation board” at Michaels for $5. (I went there looking for matboard, and this is basically the same thing, but the matboard cost $15!) Because I want the part under the barrel tiles to be black (so it just looks like a shadow), I got a black presentation board.

With a ruler in hand and a vague idea that I needed to cut four pieces — angled to meet up in the middle — I got to work.

There was a lot of trial and error involved but I’ll spare you those photos since it turns out I was on the wrong track. Before I realized I was on the wrong track, though, I cut my four pieces and sponged white paint onto the undersides for the ceilings. Turns out that when you paint black presentation board white, it comes out kinda purple.

It took three coats to stop looking purple.

Right, so here’s where I realized I had a problem. These are the four pieces I cut. The idea was that the two rectangular pieces would go on the left peak (when you’re looking at the front of the house), and the two angled pieces on the right peak. The hole in the corner of that front piece is to accommodate the neck of the fireplace that sticks up above the roofline.

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