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Half scale spiral staircase made from a wooden fan

August 1, 2014 / / 6 Comments

I recently bought two embossed box boxes from Pier 1 with the plan to make them into half scale roomboxes. The black one has about 9 1/4″ of vertical space inside — big enough to break into two stories in half scale. I had been wanting to try making a spiral staircase out of a fan as shown in this tutorial, and as luck would have it, Pier 1 sells fans too!

I started by taking apart the fan and cutting off the slats about halfway up the design. I used nail scissors to cut them, then sanded with an emery board.

At the bottom of the design, I made a hole to accommodate a 1/16″ dowel using my new micro drill. (This was actually larger than any of the bits that came with the set, but I was able to use one of the bits from the power drill in the micro drill.) Below on the left you can see a slat with a hole, and on the right a pencil mark for the next hole.

I then cut a few slats below the hole and measured them to make sure they would fit in the roombox. This was easier to visualize in centimeters. The roombox is exactly 6cm deep, which meant my slats couldn’t have more than 3cm between the dowel and the outer edge, since the spiral staircase goes all the way around.

(Does that make sense? If the complete staircase is a circle with a diameter that can’t be larger than 6cm, then the radius has to be 3cm or smaller.)

Anyway, the slats I had cut were a bit too large.

I cut them down a little bit more. It’s not as pretty with the flower at the edge cut up, but now the space from the hole to the edge was just 3cm, which meant the staircase would fit in my 6cm box.

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Everybody must get stoned!

July 24, 2014 / / 2 Comments

(Not that kind of stoned. If a Google search brought you here, my apologies.)

When I made the front steps for the Gull Bay, I impulsively made the stairs brick and painted the treads the color of the house, thinking “there must be stairs like this in real life, right?” I should have done some research first, because it appears that brick stairs with wood, house-colored treads don’t really exist in real life.

My dad suggested that the treads could be stone instead, and I started thinking about how I could do that without destroying what I’d already built.

I started by masking off the brick so it wouldn’t get messed up. Then I spread watered-down wood filler over the treads, as you can see on the top step in the photo below. I used my finger and a piece of egg carton to give the wood filler a rough texture.

Next I painted a base coat of gray. (On the left is a planter for the Rosedale that I painted at the same time.)

When the base coat dried, I did my usual “fake stone” painting technique, splatting on different shades of gray with a dry brush. I included a dark blue/gray slate color that’s similar to the Gull Bay’s stained shingles and shutters.

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Half scale glass-top table with 3D printed chairs

July 23, 2014 / / 2 Comments

I’m outfitting my Queen Anne Rowhouse with a lot of formal / traditional furniture, but the kitchen is decidedly modern. I bought a set of 3D printed Dog Bone Chairs from Pretty Small Things and wanted a glass-topped table to go with them. Unable to find anything like what I was picturing, I made my own (with help from Dad!).

The table is made from a plexiglass oval I bought off Etsy, and some metal tubing and rivets Geoff had left over from when he built an airplane.

We cut a piece of paper the size of the oval and laid the chairs on top of it to figure out where to put the legs.

After roughly tracing the edges of the seats, I had an idea of where the legs could sit without getting in the way.

We folded the paper in half, then in half again. I drew around the head of the rivet to illustrate where the leg would go, then poked a hole through the center of this.

When the paper is unfolded, the poked hole is (more or less) positioned in the same spot in all four corners.

After taping the paper onto the oval, my dad used it as a guide to drill holes with the drill press.

Here it is with the rivets inserted. Note that these rivets are longer than the ones in the photo at the top of the blog post. We used the longest ones Geoff had, to add stability to the legs. But they weren’t quite long enough to be table legs, which is where the metal tubing comes in.

We cut four pieces of metal tubing, about 1-1/8″ long. In half scale, this is the equivalent of 27″ high. This plus the thickness of the plexiglass oval makes the table about 30″ (standard table height).

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