With work on the exterior towers (mostly) done, it seems safe to assemble the Victorianna’s second floor porch railing. I was putting it off to prevent knocking into it, plus the porch has made a great platform for holding tower pieces as I’ve been working on them…

There were some gaps between the porch floorboards and the crown molding trim that needed filling in. Normally I’d use wood filler for something like this, but I didn’t trust myself to paint over the wood filler neatly without getting dribbles of gray on the beige.

I was on the verge of doing it — against my better judgment — when I remembered the tub of gray mortar that I originally bought to grout the Victorianna’s bricks. (2+ years later, they’re still nowhere close to being ready for that!)

The mortar is darker than the porch gray, but it makes the gaps blend in, which is all I needed to do. Once the railing is glued in there will be too much going on to notice this (but if I’d left the gaps unfilled, I think you would have noticed them).

Since the porch has been a landing spot for construction debris for so long, before starting on the railing I cleaned it up with a damp paper towel and touched up the paint.

For the newel posts, I used 1/4″ square basswood with baseboard around the bottoms, like the ones on the first floor. Since these don’t support a roof they need some kind of cap and finial at the top. There aren’t many options for spindles, newel posts, etc. in half scale so I like cutting up 1:12 pieces and using the parts in half scale.

The Victorianna’s first floor staircase has a square newel post with a finial on the top that I cut off a 1:12 post. I’m not sure what style newel post I cut it off of and I can’t find any online right now (it might have been an old/discontinued package that I bought at a mini flea market). I had five of those posts left and that’s how many the porch needs, so it seemed like a good way to use them.

On the staircase newel post, I left a bit of the post exposed at the top and then added skinny trim, which I think was leftover window mullion pieces. For the porch, I initially cut off the finials a little lower intending to add the same skinny trim around the bottom of the cut off piece, to create that stair-step effect.

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