Continuing with the Victorianna’s spiral staircase — I wasn’t happy with how the stain turned out on the top step, so I painted it to match the landing.

I filled in the laser cut part with wood filler. That piece needed to be “bad side up” for it to face the right direction, so the design was a mirror image of all the other steps. My inner perfectionist just couldn’t take it!

I bought some brads to fill in the holes that resulted from the railing pieces not fitting properly, but I didn’t like how they looked.

The holes are about 1/8″ square. An 1/8″ piece of strip wood wouldn’t fit — presumably that’s also why the railing pieces didn’t fit — but the next size down that I had on hand, 3/32″, was slightly too small.

By cutting the 3/32″ dowel into pieces slightly longer than 3/32″, I was able to cram them into the holes so they’d stay put. On a leftover stair I tried one stained with walnut and one with ebony, to see which looked better. I decided to stick with the walnut (the same color as the steps).

This took a surprisingly long time to do. I kept cutting the pieces slightly too short or slightly too long, or dropping them or breaking them as I tried to cram them into the holes. I inserted them from the back, then added glue to the back to keep them in place.

Next I added risers between the treads. I added a side piece on the bottom step to help stabilize it but didn’t bother with side pieces on the rest since they’ll be up against the wall. The risers are cut at a 45-degree angle where they meet the center post.

It’s surely a code violation not to have a railing, but that would have made the whole thing a lot more complicated. I may not have had a choice, since the pieces didn’t fit, but in the end I’m glad I left it off.

I lost the ball glued to the top of the post while I was filling in the holes and couldn’t find it. Luckily I had one more (it’s cut off the top of a 1:12 Centurian newel post). This time I poked a hole in the ball and the post and inserted a piece of wire to hold them together, in addition to glue. (The wire isn’t that long! I cut it down after I took the picture.)

Here’s the almost finished staircase. I haven’t added a riser to the top step yet. I want to make sure that step is positioned exactly right inside the hole, so I’ll wait until I assemble the rest of the cupola to glue that step in place and add the riser.

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The cupola on the Victorianna’s right-hand tower started out as a 1:48 scale gazebo. But because there’s no separation between the cupola and the tower room below, I wanted the cupola to be enclosed rather than “open air” like a gazebo.

The bottom level of the towers has 1:12 corner blocks underneath the windows. They turned out to be slightly too tall to go under the second level’s windows, so I had a bunch left over. They fit nicely into the bottom portion of the gazebo panels.

I used an Xacto knife to cut out the slats.

Next I used the belt sander to shave off the nubs on the sides of the panels.

I plan to fill in the gaps between each gazebo panel with dowels — that’s why those nubs had to go away.

Next I added 1/8″ strip wood to three sides of the corner blocks so they fit into the panel openings, and glued them in.

At this point I started worrying about how to add windows. My plan was to add acetate to the back sides of the panels, since there didn’t seem to be enough space on the fronts to to neatly add trim over the edges of the acetate, but there’s very little wood to glue the acetate to. Also, the decorative trim in the edges of the opening aren’t very window-like — they’re more porch or gazebo-like (duh). It would be much easier to pop in preassembled windows than try to attach my own.

But what windows? These window openings are about 7/8″ by 1-1/2″. Everything I found for half scale miniatures or G scale trains was bigger than that, and the 1:48 scale miniature windows and O scale train windows were the wrong dimensions… until my Google kung-fu landed me on the Kitwood Hill Models website.

They sell a set of O scale windows exactly the right size for my opening, that came eight to a set — exactly the number I needed. I couldn’t *not* try them. (Added bonus: the bottom window sashes actually slide up, so you can open the windows! Totally unnecessary for my purposes, but cool nonetheless.)

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I’ve finally reached the point on the Victorianna where I can glue on the front roof pieces. Yay, progress!

My plan was to add fishscale shingles to the top portions of the towers. I got these from Alpha Stamps.

I don’t know why, but even though it looked great in my head, I hated this once I saw it. The scale of the shingles is fine but they seem too big and chunky somehow — more like a dragon’s back than a pretty Victorian detail. I let it sit like that overnight just in case I changed my mind, but the next day I still hated it. Luckily the chipboard shingles were easy to rip off!

On to Plan B (which didn’t exist yet). I hadn’t prepared the plywood with the intention of having it show, so the towers needed to be covered up with something. Adding siding seemed like a pain because of all the seams — I’ve never been very good at cutting straight edges on clapboard siding, and the siding I have on hand is brittle and splits easily. I knew it wouldn’t look good.

The beadboard I used inside on the bathroom wall was easier to work with, but when I held it up against the tower wall the grooves seemed way too small.

So I ended up buying some 1/4″ board and batten siding from Miniatures.com. Since the grooves run vertically, the corners will be much easier to deal with than they would have been with clapboard siding — I’ll just butt the pieces up next to each other and fill in the seams with wood filler.

Whenever possible I like to swap out the windows on a die-cut dollhouse with Houseworks windows, or at least make my own trim as I did on the tower’s bay windows, but that’s easier said than done when the window has a non-standard shape. I wasn’t excited about using the window trim that came with the kits. Compared to the bay windows underneath, the oval trim seems clunky and way out of scale.

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