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Victorianna nursery furniture

July 5, 2017 / / 5 Comments

As I mentioned last time, that zebra’s butt sticking out the side of the corner cabinet was driving me crazy.

I was seriously thinking of building a new, slightly bigger cabinet to cover up the ass-end of the zebra. Then I realized I just needed to add strip wood to the sides of the cabinet I already had.

The piece on the left is 3/16″, and the piece on the right is 1/4″. I did it this way so both sides end neatly between animals. This room is a funny shape because of the tower, so you’ll never be able to see the cabinet straight on and the slight difference between the two sides won’t be noticeable.

I glued on the pieces, plus another support piece behind the 1/4″ square basswood for added stability against the wall.

The cabinet had a grooved trim on the sides. I filled in the grooves with wood filler.

With the grooves filled in, the cabinet trim blends in better with the added pieces. The grooved part at the bottom will get covered up with baseboard.

When the roof is in place, there’s a 1/8″ gap at the top of the cabinet. I’m planning to continue the crown molding from the wall along the top of the cabinet, but it will need something behind it to attach to.

I added 1/8″ square strips to the top. These will be entirely covered by the crown molding, so I didn’t worry about making them neat.

Here’s how it’ll look with the crown molding and baseboard.

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Victorianna – starting the baby’s room

June 27, 2017 / / 2 Comments

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

June 10, 2017 / / 1 Comment

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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