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Victorianna – starting the baby’s room

The final room on the Victorianna’s top floor will be a nursery, and I took a break from the master bathroom to wallpaper it. (This needed to happen before I could glue in the door between the two rooms and finish the trim in the bathroom.) This is an Itsy Bitsy wallpaper that I bought way back when. I was able to do both of these walls with one piece, so there’s no seam, and I have enough left over to do the outside of the tower. The inside of the tower will be different — still working it out in my head, so I’ll leave you in suspense for now!

Like in the girl’s room downstairs, I cut the border off the top of the wallpaper and glued it on more at a kid’s eye level. I’ll add trim to the top and bottom edges.

A few hours later — after the glue dried, of course — I started playing around with furniture. I’d been planning to use this cute hand-painted wardrobe (made by Pam Junk and Cheryl Hollis) in the downstairs room but ran out of space for it there, so I was thinking I could put it in this room instead. But the colors and animals weren’t quite right (the safari animals would gobble up those swans!), and tucked into the corner it would be hard to see.

Then I remembered this corner bookshelf I bought years ago from A Trifle Small. (Houseworks has since started making one that’s similar.) I love how it looks in the corner, and it’s tall enough that I can turn it into a built-in, but my eyes keep going to that zebra butt sticking out the side. In the downstairs bedroom I was careful to do the border in a way that didn’t chop any animals in half. Same with the elephant to the right of the door in the baby’s room.

I only have two tiny scraps of border left — just enough to do the outside of the tower walls. I thought about trying to slice the border in the corner while the glue was still tacky and pull it off but that seemed like a disaster waiting to happen. In yet another case of Doing Something Complicated to Fix a Tiny Problem, I’m thinking of building my own corner cabinet that’s a little wider so it covers up the zebra’s butt. I know, I know. I’m a weirdo.

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Finishing the linen closet & making a basket

Continuing with the linen closet that only exists because I cut a piece of wallpaper badly: I painted the door and the closet Tuscan Beige, the trim color I’m using throughout the house. It looks white when there’s nothing white near it, but here you can see how different it is from the bright white that the door was originally painted.

To pin hinge the door, I laid it in the frame and used the micro drill to drill a hole through the bottom of the frame and up into the door.

This resulted in a hole pretty close to the side and front of the door. I’m glad I drilled them both at the same time, because my instinct would have been to make the hole closer to the center.

The top of the closet is much thicker than the bottom, so I couldn’t drill through the top piece the same way. Based on the location of the hole on the bottom, I drilled a hole at the top in about the same spot. Then I cut down a pin and stuck it into the hole with the pointy part sticking up.

I slipped the door back into the frame, stuck in a piece of wire from the bottom to act as the hinge (to ensure the door was positioned correctly), and pushed the door upward so the pointy pin made a hole in the top of the frame.

Next I added a knob made from a cut-down pin (the other side of the pin I’d cut down for the upper hinge) and a clear seed bead. The towels inside are cut from a chenille Dollar Store washcloth. I glued them in, since the closet will be very hard to access once it’s glued into the house.

The top shelf doesn’t quite meet the ceiling, so there’s a visible gap behind the shelf. Rather than try to make the closet a perfect fit, I can hide that gap with stuff on the shelf.

I still have toilet paper rolls left over from last year’s half scale swap, but I didn’t want them to be loose on the shelf, so I made a basket to hold them.

I started with a piece of scrap wood and a strip of fabric out of my cross stitch stash. I think the fabric is waste canvas — it’s stiffer than normal evenweave, more like needlepoint canvas, but with a high thread count that seems appropriate for a 1:24 basket. After I cut the strip, I ran a bead of anti-fraying glue along the top edge to secure it.

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Double vanity and yet another closet

The Victorianna’s master bathroom is 7.5″ deep, which gives me a nice long wall for the vanity. Even with the tub in place at the front corner I have 5″ to play with. I’m not used to such big bathrooms in dollhouses! (Or real life, for that matter.)

I had been planning to bash a Cassidy Creations store counter kit into a vanity but once I started looking at the pieces, I determined it was too tall and too deep. I found dimensions online for a large double vanity and converted them into half scale, rounding up or down as needed to make use of the wood I had on hand.

I started with a front and two sides like this. The sides are 1″ deep and the vanity is slightly less than 1.5″ tall.

This bottom piece is one of the base pieces I didn’t use on the sleigh bed. It’s 3″ wide, which makes this the equivalent of a 72″ vanity.

On the inside, I put scraps in the corners and across the back to help keep it square.

I also added a support piece at the top for the countertop to rest on.

The doors are made from two 1:24 shutters, cut in half and then sanded to be equal heights. The height of the shutters is what determined the height of the vanity overall — I prepared those first, and then cut the front piece to fit. I glued drawers between the cabinet doors. (Obviously none of these open!)

I glued on the shutter doors so they lined up with the top edge of the base’s curved corner, and then added cove molding to dress it up a little.

The counter is made from 1″ basswood. My options in the scrap drawer were either a very thin piece or a very thick piece, and I opted for the thin one for easier cutting of the sink holes. The piece was a little warped, so I added strip wood around the edges of the underside to help straighten it out and also make the counter look more substantial.

I’m using 3D printed sinks from MiniEtchers. To cut the holes, I figured out the rough size by measuring the edges of the basin, cut a rough hole, and then sanded it to make it bigger. The sinks have a lip so it’s okay that the holes are jagged.

An unintended benefit of the strip wood underneath the counter is that I cut the fronts and outside edges of the holes right up against the strip wood, so the two sinks are aligned and equally spaced from the edges without having to do a lot of measuring.

The counter is 1″ deep and the vanity is also 1″ deep, plus the depth of the doors and drawers. Basswood doesn’t come in 1-inch-plus-a-little-bit sizes, so using 1″ for both was really the only way to do this without cutting down a much bigger piece. I made the counter slightly wider than the sink so it can overhang on the sides. A 1/4″ deep backsplash sits behind the counter to make up the extra space at the back.

This way the counter hangs over slightly at the front.

Moving on to the closet. With the master bedroom closet on the other side of the wall, I wasn’t planning to put one in the bathroom too. But when I wallpapered this wall, I didn’t bring the paper back far enough on the tab to meet up with the ceiling. I couldn’t think of a neat way to fix that, so… let’s make another closet!

This dollhouse already has closets with louvered doors in the master bedroom and the downstairs bathroom, plus the vanity has louvered doors… there’s such a thing as too many louvers! I looked at photos of real bathrooms and saw several linen closet doors with a panel on the bottom and glass at the top. That reminded me of the broken Majestic Mansions door I’ve been holding on to.

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