With the book roombox’s wainscot finished, I moved to the upstairs. I didn’t like the clunkiness of the piece of wood anchoring the top of the staircase, so I used fan pieces to make a decorative cover for it.

Sprayed this with semi-gloss black to match the stairs. Geoff wasn’t around so I did it myself this time, with uneven results. After the paint dried I ended up sanding it and repainting it by hand with my matte black acrylic paint.

We’re getting close to the “putting it all together” stage. Since this floor is like a loft and it’s open on the left side, I thought about adding a railing to keep the little people from falling off. I used my micro drill to make three holes that would accommodate toothpick spindles.

Here’s how that would have looked.

After I’d gone and made the holes, I realized that adding a railing there meant there wouldn’t be enough room for the resin pedestal I’d been planning to put to the side of the bookcase, and I really wanted to use that. So I filled the holes back in.

Wood filler was not the right way to do this. I tried staining the holes with a stain I thought would match the rest of the floor, but it only resulted in a dark space around the holes (the woodfiller itself didn’t “take” the stain at all) and then I had to stain the rest of the floor to match, making it darker.

After doing all this I remembered the trick my dad taught me for filling nail holes in stained wood with a wax stain pencil. I ended up doing this to fill the holes and it looks better now, but I still have a darker floor. I stained the bottom floor to match it, but if I had a rewind button I’d go back to those lighter floors. Oh well.

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I’ve been working on a half scale roombox made from an embossed book box I got at Pier 1. I’ve seen boxes like this at Michaels before but they always seemed kind of chintsy. These are really nice, though, with heavy leather covers and leather-lined insides. I got both colors — the black one is big enough for a two-story scene, while the maroon one, when I get around to it, will be one (tall) scene with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves.

As I described in my last post, I started by making a spiral staircase out of a wooden fan.

Once I knew where the top step would be, I made a floor out of pieces of basswood. These are two 1″ wide pieces with a stained 1/4″ piece in between. I decided to stain the middle piece because it was slightly deeper than the 1″ pieces (I was using scraps I had on hand) and I thought it could look like a beam.

I covered the other portions of the ceiling, including the top inside edge of the box, with a leathery gold scrapbook paper from my stash.

For the floor, I used a sheet of wood veneer from a batch I got off eBay.

I didn’t want to cut into another sheet of veneer, so ended up with a thin strip of floor uncovered at the back of the second floor.

I cut a small strip from the piece leftover from the stair hole, and used this on the left edge of the floor. The rest of the blank area will be covered up by the bookshelves. These are Houseworks bookcases I’ve had lying around for about 10 years — I bought them for the Fairfield and didn’t use them. Never throw anything away!

Here’s the general idea.

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