The bar interior is on hold until I have everything I need to do the electricity, so I moved on to the outside. A while ago I got some Magic Brick and Magic Slate for a good price. (I mostly do half scale projects, so part of the fun of doing a 1:12 roombox is using up all these supplies I’ve picked up on the cheap!) I decided to use the Magic Slate for the bar’s patio and the brick on the exterior walls.

The patio walls have pegs at the bottom that fit into pre-drilled holes in the patio. These walls need to be glued to the patio, and then that assembly gets glued to the front facade of the bar.

First I needed to take care of a problem with the walls not quite fitting. I think the holes that the patio walls fit into were slightly off, which prevented these two walls from meeting squarely.

To fix this, I drilled into the hole with a drill bit the next size up, so there’s a little bit of slop when the peg fits into the hole. This fixed the problem with the top peg.

Magic Slate and Magic Brick come with mortar line templates that you lay down over the surface. Then you coat the surface with a stucco-like material and pull up the template, which leaves behind a slate or brick pattern in the stucco. I painted the patio floor gray — this will be the mortar color between the slate pavers. (I also painted the front of the bar. None of this is glued together yet.)

I drew around the walls so I’d know where they go. I don’t want to get any of the slate material in these areas.

I covered these areas with masking tape.

Next I lay down the Magic Slate template.

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I bought the bar that will go inside the Blackbird Bar for $15 at a miniature flea market. It has a label on the back that says “Handmade by the Mini Wizards” – I don’t know who these wizards are and haven’t been able to find any details online. If you’ve heard of them, please tell me!

The bar needs shelves to hold the glasses and liquor bottles, but first I had to give the thing a good dusting and make some minor repairs. The trim around the mirrors had come unglued and was only being held in by silver tape on the backs.

I folded the trim pieces back into place and used tacky glue to resecure them to the mirrors.

The wood was kind of dingy and I wanted to darken it up, but the bar is polyurethaned and has a lot of corners and hard-to-reach spots, so painting or re-staining seemed like it would be difficult. I had this jar of Old English scratch cleaner left over from my old house, where we used it to cover up scratches in our kitchen cabinets. A coat of this helped spruce it up.

This wine rack was disconnected when I bought the bar, and I was torn about whether to glue it back in. I like the idea of glasses hanging down off the wine rack, but it takes up a lot of space and doesn’t have the elegance I’m going for.

I started thinking about adding a wine rack to one of the shelves under the bar and went as far to search for one with the right dimensions, when it occurred to me that I could cut down the one that came with it.

A perfect fit! In this location you’ll still be able to see it, without having it dominate one whole side of the bar.

I’m planning to put bottles on the large side and glassware and the cash register on the small side. The trim is notched to accommodate the top of the wine rack, so I couldn’t just remove that piece. I thought about hanging a television off of it.

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After working nonstop on the Victorianna almost all year I decided to distract myself with a smaller project. In the early 2000’s I had a grand but short-lived plan to enter one of Miniatures.com‘s annual contests with a bar roombox. I bought some furniture and mini bottles but never got around to doing anything with them. Then in 2014 I found a handmade bar for $15 at a mini flea market — I bought that and a Chaplin Roombox to put it in.

These have been sitting on a shelf untouched ever since, until a few weeks ago I started thinking it would be fun to put little people in the bar. Houseworks makes these resin figures (or at least, they used to — they’re discontinued now) that are very lifelike, but never appealed to me in a dollhouse because of how staged they are. Here’s a scene HBS/Miniatures.com featured on one of their holiday catalogs:

I tend to think of dollhouses as living places — not frozen moments in time — so there’s something weird to me about having frozen people in the house. (I made an exception in the Little House Cabin, but those dolls are much more doll-like.) I work in the video game industry, where the subject of the “uncanny valley” often comes up — it’s when 3D characters look so close to human, but not quite, that they’re creepy. I’ve always felt that way about the resin dollhouse dolls, too.

Still, the idea of adding them to the bar got me excited. I liked that each of these people can have a little story that you can piece together based on what’s going on around them. And I’ll admit, once I found out they’re discontinued, finding each of the dolls I wanted to use became an irresistable challenge. I made a few impulse purchases the week before Thanksgiving, and the Blackbird Bar is now officially under construction.

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