At long last, the Victorianna’s porch is becoming real. (To see how we got to this point, check out my posts about the porch modifications, porch progress, and bay window exteriors.)

I modified the porch to have a flat roof rather than a slanted one. In theory, this would have slipped neatly into a slot I left in the siding, with the crown molding at the tops of the bay windows providing support. Unfortunately, the bay window on the right is slightly too tall, which forces the porch out of the slot. This means the porch will mainly be held in place by the crown molding and posts it rests on.

I wanted to have the porch posts evenly spaced, but the off-center front door threw a wrench in that plan. Instead I decided to do a post in the center (where the two Victorianna kits bashed together meet), plus another one as far to the right of the door as the center post is to the left of it. The railing I’m using is a 1:12 spandrel that comes in a 10″ length, so it’s long enough for the ~7″ span between the left corner and center posts. (Many half scale railings I looked at only come in 5″ lengths.)

Some of the trim I’m using (like the spandrel railing) is from Victorian Dollhouse Wood Works on eBay and some is from Heritage Laserworks. I bought tons of trim for a frilly porch that looked great in my head, but some of those ideas didn’t look as great in practice.

For example: my initial idea was to do grillwork between the posts with brackets underneath, and a fancy arch at the doorway. It looked neat on the table.

On the house, though, I didn’t like how the grillwork got in the way of the bay window embellishments I recently added. Also, part of why I picked out the arch trim was because it was exactly the same height as the running trim + bracket on the opposite side of the post, but it would have made the space around the doorway much too wide.

So I simplified it, removing the grill and planning to use the same brackets on all of the porch posts.

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“Frilling” might not be the right word (or a word at all), but after I completed the Victorianna’s downstairs bay windows I felt like they were a little too plain. I wanted to spruce them up a bit before adding the porch trim, which will make them harder to reach.

Here’s what I started with.

All the empty space above the window was bugging me. I wanted to add some sort of pediment, ideally a semi-circle to mimic the top of the door. In 1:12 scale you can buy something like that, but I couldn’t find anything similar in 1:24 scale or G scale train supplies. I was thinking about what I could cut in half — wooden checkers, for example — but everything I came up with was too big or too complicated.

I kept coming back to this semi-circle window doodad from Victorian Dollhouse Wood Works on eBay. I used these on my Queen Anne Rowhouse and didn’t necessarily want to repeat the same trim on another house, but I couldn’t find anything else that was comparable. The sticking point was that the trim is 1-1/8″ wide, and the windows are just 5/8″ wide.

After looking at a lot of pictures of bay windows for ideas, I decided to add casing around the windows. This makes the windows “pop” (as they say on HGTV), plus it adds enough width to accommodate the window doodad. As an added bonus, the left-hand window on the left bay was slightly shorter than the others, and casing that’s the same height on all the windows draws your eye away from the unevenness.

Looking at the one bay with casing compared to the one without convinced me it’s the right choice.

I added casing to the other bay window. When the glue was dry I filled in the cracks at the corners with wood filler, using a toothpick to scrape wood filler out of the grooves in the casing. This was much easier to do on the outside of the house than on the interior windows! Then I painted over the corners

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