I am ready to lay the hardwood floors on the first floor of the house. (The second floor has to wait until after the wiring is done and the built-in bed is constructed to cover those ugly brackets…) I painted the flooring with two coats of varnish stuff (not exactly sure what it is, Geoff picked it up at Home Depot), which gives it a nice finish.

Once the floor is glued down, I am going to assemble this closet kit to go in the smaller downstairs room (by the stairs). I hate it when guests have nowhere to hang their coats!

Update, February 14: Geoff finally brought me the digital camera so I could take some pictures of what I’ve been working on at home. I have assembled the conservatory that will be used as a kitchen, and started building the kitchen furniture. All that’s missing is the trim at the peak. I want to use something slightly different from what came in the kit, which I need to order. (Oh, in these pictures the French doors are missing, too. When I painted them, a bit of paint got on the windows. I removed the doors so I could get the paint off with rubbing alcohol.)

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I realized that I messed something up. (Big surprise there!) To achieve this “double hung” window effect, each double window gets trim on one opening, and the other opening is supposed to be painted to look like the trim. Well, my white posterboard around the top of the inside windows doesn’t look anything like the painted white trim around the bottom of the windows. It was an easy fix though. I just removed the posterboard from that part of the windows and painted the wood white. Then I glued the blue window casings and sills onto the walls. Looks smashing, if I do say so myself.

Update, January 19: The shell has been assembled! After quite a bit of drama… but what fun would it be without the drama?

First of all, remember how the front wall was warped? Well, even after sitting under heavy books for a few weeks, it was curved in the middle. Glue wasn’t going to hold it. Geoff suggested we get some brackets and screw the front of the house to the first and second floors, as well as gluing. But the hardware store didn’t have small enough brackets, so we bought some and he cut them smaller with one of his neat tools that shoots sparks. I wish I’d gotten a picture of that, but I was too annoyed by this turn of events (and guilt-ridden because Geoff was taking time out of airplane building to help) to think that far ahead.

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I’ve been painting window casings. The outside casings are red, and I’ve decided to do the inside ones blue… the same blue as the exterior of the house. There’s a method to this madness. The French doors that will lead into the conservatory addition will be blue, because the conservatory itself is blue. It would be hard to paint the door half blue (the side facing the conservatory) and half white (facing into the house)… at least, hard for someone who has trouble staying inside the lines, which I do. So I figured I’d do the window and door casings blue as well, and have a nice white-and-blue theme.

Here are the exterior window casings for the front of the house. There are actually a few more pieces (like those corner blocks that I didn’t paint) that I’m leaving off to make the house less cutsey.

I also finished painting and assembling the front door. It isn’t attached until later in the process, but here it is in all its glory…

Hopefully, you won’t be able to see the white (interior) paint when the door is standing up. It’s hard to tell from this picture, but the photo album material I used to make the windows seems to be working fine.