People keep telling me they like my blog because I show the mistakes I make and how I fix them. I don’t do this on purpose! But it’s true that sometimes (okay, a lot of times) I go down a rabbit hole, and then I can’t stop myself from meticulously documenting what went wrong.

This is one of those times, because I’ve redone the Turret House’s front facade. Again.

I’ve been working on the Turret House behind the scenes but haven’t posted about it in a few months, so here’s a refresher. This was my first attempt on the area in question:

The chunky corbels seemed busy and out of scale. On my second try, I ripped out all of them but the ones on the ends, and I covered up the wood where the corbels had been with laser cut trim on the bottom (with gold showing through) and half scale crown molding on the top.

It’s an improvement, but I was still lukewarm about it. The detail of the crown molding gets lost in the shadow, so it just looks like a big blue blob on top of the fancier trim. And those corbels are still pretty chunky.

I also wasn’t really feeling the dentil molding on the bay window. I’d planned to use dentil molding on the sides of the house and thought there would be a nice smooth transition, but it didn’t look great. And as I started thinking about porch trim, I realized the dentil molding in the background would compete with the porch trim in the foreground.

So I did what I do best… I ripped it all out. I love how I can spend hours and hours on something and destroy it in a matter of minutes.

(Sorry for the blurry picture, but this is the only one I took at this stage. It looked so bad, why document it?!)

Removing the corbels left me with two 5/16″ spaces that needed to be filled in. And I wanted brackets that look substantial, like they’re holding up the porch roof. After a lot of looking around, I found these brackets at Earth and Tree.

These are unusual because they’re made from five 1/16″ pieces that get glued together for a layered effect. The fan design is reminiscent of the apex trim.

I had to make a notch for the bracket to fit over the wood piece. I carefully did this on each piece using the belt sander rather than cutting, to avoid splitting the wood.

Before gluing the pieces together, I painted areas that I wouldn’t be able to get at once the bracket was assembled.

Once all five pieces were glued together, I cleaned up the notch on the sander. Here’s how the bracket looks in place. I also had to sand the front a tiny bit to make it fit under here.

Once this is glued in, I’ll fill in the gap at the back with wood filler and paint over it.

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