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Victorianna chimney with egg carton brick

When I first started planning how to do the Victorianna’s roof, I made a chimney piece out of leftover kit parts. I cut the kit’s chimney piece flat where it will meet the flat roof.

I glued on a piece of 1:12 channel molding and a piece of scrap wood (a spacer from a furniture kit).

Then I glued on the other kit’s chimney piece. This little box fits over a protruding piece that would have formed the back of the chimney, if I’d built the kit according to the directions.

With the flat and sloped roof pieces now attached, I need to finish and attach the chimney before I can shingle the sloped roof. On this side of the house, the angle of the chimney meets up perfectly with the roof.

But there’s a gap on this side because my house and roof aren’t square.

I filled this in with a skinny piece of strip wood.

I glued pieces of 1/8″ x 1/4″ strip wood around the top of the chimney to create ledges that make it more visually interesting. These are spaced 1/8″ apart.

Here’s how the cobbled-together chimney looks from the top. It needs to be covered up.

I cut a piece of wood to fit inside the hole. I’ll paint this black and add chimney pots to it.

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Victorianna — the last bay window

The Victorianna has four bay windows on the front, and one on the back. I finished the ones on the front of the house several years ago — you can read about that here, here, here, and here.

In late 2018 I started on the kitchen bay window as part of the kitchen project, but once the kitchen was finished I lost interest, and it’s sat in an almost finished state ever since.

I really am determined to get this house done while I’m stuck sheltering in place during the coronavirus pandemic (that’s a phrase I never would have expected to say two weeks ago!), so this week I did the last little bit on the last bay window.

The process I used to finish the bay windows is documented in the posts I linked to above, but I’ve been saving these pictures so I might as well run through it quickly again here. The first steps were to add crown molding to the bottom, frame the insides of the windows with painted strip wood, and glue on the window acetate.

Next I covered the sides with strip wood.

I added crown molding to the top and quarter round into the gaps in the corners.

Then I added the decorative panels (1:12 scale corner blocks) and more strip wood to cover the rest of the gaps.

I added wood filler to all the seams and then painted over it.

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Victorianna — attaching the sloped roof

It’s the end of the world as we know it… and I feel fine…

Ahem. Hi! Hope everyone’s doing okay with the coronavirus weirdness. I’m taking advantage of my self-imposed isolation to get some work done on the Victorianna — maybe I’ll have the house finished by the time the world gets back to normal. (Want to take bets?)

My original plan for the Victorianna’s small sloped roof was to use four hinged windows as skylights. This would have provided a bird’s eye view into the nursery and the master bedroom and given those rooms some much needed light.

Between the house not being square, the roof pieces not having much of a surface to attach to, and my eagerness to finally finish this house after 5+ years, I decided to leave out the skylights. (Actually, Geoff talked me out of it.) The piece just wouldn’t have been stable enough with those four holes in it.

Here’s the roof piece Geoff cut for me.

We left it too long at the top on purpose.

The Victorianna is made from two kits that I bashed together, it has a small hump in middle where the two kits meet. Also, the sides of the roof don’t have anything holding them up, so they droop a little. As a result, the peak where the sloped roof pieces meet up isn’t a straight line.

I drew a pencil line along the top of the front roof piece and Geoff cut it for me with the jigsaw, so it will meet the front roof piece neatly. We also cut the sloped roof in half, because when it was one big piece it couldn’t sit flat (due to the hump in the middle of the house). And we beveled the bottom edge where it meets up with the flat roof.

I didn’t bother taking pictures of these steps — I just stepped back and let Geoff do the work. Trying to figure it out was making my head hurt and he came to the rescue! Here’s the result.

Next I pulled the ceiling paper (which I’d left hanging to attach to this piece once it’s glued in) against the underside of the sloped roof and drew a pencil line at the top so I could cut the paper to fit.

Then I glued in the sloped roof pieces. I did them one at a time, holding the roof piece in place with clamps while the glue dried.


On the front there was a bit of a crack where the two pieces met. I glopped glue in there.

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