With the base finished, the next step in Rosedale landscaping was gluing down the patio. I don’t attach my houses to the base permanently, but I do glue down the landscaping elements, so I had to measure carefully and make sure the patio was properly centered.

When I first pulled out these flagstones, I intended to create a rectangular courtyard in front of the house. My dad and I spent a long time playing around with the various pieces (15 sets of a square, a long rectangle, and a short rectangle) to try to come up with a good pattern. Here were some of the contenders.

Initially I really liked the idea of using all the pieces, with a walkway on the left and a patio area on the right, but also needed to figure out what to do with the topiary planters. I was going to place one one each side of the walkway but my dad thought it was weird to have one topiary on the patio and one in the grass.

He suggested keeping the walkway on the left and using fewer flagstones on the right to make a smaller patio area on the right, so the topiaries would be on the grass, just behind the fence posts, on either side. I resisted it at first but after playing around a bit more I decided he was right. The benefit of this is that we now had more flagstones to play with, and came up with cleaner patterns for both the walkway and the patio.

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This past weekend, my parents visited and I pulled out the Rosedale so we could landscape it together. (My mom is a gardener with a good sense of how to lay out a garden, and my dad’s a woodworker who’s good at things like building swiveling dollhouse bases. They helped me landscape the Fairfield a few years ago.) I have a ton of pictures so I’ll divide them up over a few blogs. Today’s topic: making the base.

The first thing we did was lay out a theoretical garden using pieces I already had on hand, and a few we picked up at the store. (It’s lucky I live in the same neighborhood as a fully stocked miniatures shop! No, that’s *not* why I moved into this house…) The Rosedale has an Italianate look and I wanted that to carry over into the garden with well manicured greenery, neat lines, stone planters, etc.

Here’s what we came up with. The topiaries in the front are Dollar Tree Christmas village trees in planters I bought at the dollhouse store. The patio is made from a set of plaster “flagstones” I bought a few years ago. The house is perfectly symmetrical except for the balcony railing on the right side of the house, so I wanted to add a tree to the left side to help balance it out.

We used this layout to figure out what size to make the base. I had enough flagstones to make the patio 5″ deep, which dictated the front-to-back dimension.

We then cut a smaller piece of plywood for the bottom of the base, just large enough for the 6″ lazy susan to sit on top.

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