The Victorianna’s master bathroom is a jack-and-jill bath with one door leading to the master bedroom and one door to the nursery. Because the real tile I’m using is thicker than usual dollhouse flooring, I had to modify the doors to enable them to swing over the tile.

The threshold of Houseworks doors is higher on one side than the other, to prevent the door from swinging in one direction. This way the door always opens in.

I cut down the bottom of the door so it’s short enough to swing over this lip. Then I re-hinged the door so the pins are closer to the middle of the door. Finally I added a piece of scrap wood to the lower side of the threshold, so now the whole threshold is the same height. As a result, the bathroom doors will swing both ways — into the bathroom or into the bedroom. It’s a little funky but it’s the best I could come up with.

(Why not just turn the doors around so the high part of the threshold is against the tile in the first place? To do that I would have needed to have the doors in place when I laid the floor — with the tile glued in, it was too tight a fit to wedge the doors into the door holes from the bathroom side. For the doors to be in place when the tile was glued in, the wallpaper would have needed to be up, and I didn’t want to wallpaper before I finished the tile, for fear of getting grout on the walls. Which came first, the chicken or the egg?)

Once I got the nursery door mocked up so it would swing properly, I added shims to the trim on the nursery side and set it in place to see how far the door sticks into the bathroom. I’ll also add shims to the trim on the bathroom side, so the trim will be about the same size on each side and won’t look funny when you view the door from the side. This is better explained in an earlier post about the downstairs bathroom door.

With the door shimmed, I’m able to see how much it sticks into the bathroom. This was necessary so I knew how much to cut the two tiles directly in front of the door.

These were very hard to cut, so it’s a good thing I only needed to do two of them! I used various sharp tools until I managed to cut all the way through, and then sanded for sort of straight lines. Turning the tiles with the cut ends facing other tiles rather than putting the cut ends against the door makes them look neater than they really are.

Finally, time to grout! I used up my sand grout a while ago and didn’t want to use the dark gray mortar I’ve been using for bricks, thinking that would call attention to the inconsistent grout lines and would just be too dark. So I bought a tub of white mosaic grout at the hobby store, intending to add a little bit of gray so it wouldn’t be stark white. I remembered that I’d planned to do that about thirty seconds after I started spreading grout on the tiles.

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