With the Artist’s Cottage addition assembled, it was time to stucco the outside. For years I have been using watered down Elmer’s wood filler as dollhouse stucco (here it is on the Rosedale, and on the Artist’s Cottage itself). I recently ran out of wood filler and when I went to buy more, Home Depot didn’t have Elmer’s so I got Dap Liquid Wood instead. It has a different consistency, kind of like tahini, and it didn’t hold its shape like I wanted it to. When I used it on the inside of the addition I didn’t like the texture, so I went to a different store to buy a tub of Elmer’s for the outside.

The Elmer’s wood filler was also a different consistency than I remembered. It seems a lot wetter, but that could just be because it’s new and hasn’t had a chance to dry out yet.

Not wanting to end up (again) with something too runny for a good stucco texture, I started by spreading the wood filler directly on the house instead of watering it down first. I dabbed it with a piece of sponge to make the bumps.

This resulted in a very thick layer that took all night to dry (usually it dries in an hour). Because the addition is made of cardstock — and only one layer when I was supposed to use two — the thick layer of stucco helps give it some stability. After painting, though, the texture still seemed off to me, especially at the bottom which had rubbed on the table as I was handling the addition.

So, I watered down the Elmer’s a little bit and went back for round two.

Between rounds of waiting for the stucco and paint to dry, I worked on the rest of the inside trim.

I’m still not 100% happy with the stucco… it looks different than on the house. Here it is after another few coats of paint (more than one was needed to cover up the dark wood filler) and the addition of trim. I had tried to keep wood filler off the areas where the trim would be glued, but got a bit too close at the bottoms, so the bottom trims bow out a bit.

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In between rounds of stucco and paint on the Artist’s Cottage addition I finished the window and door trim. I almost didn’t add any trim to these — I liked the simplicity of the stained frames sticking in through the stucco. But some of the holes weren’t cut straight (for example, the top and right side of the window), so I needed some kind of trim to cover up cracks between the frames and the wall.

Usually when the Houseworks windows are deeper than the wall, I add shims to make the window frame flush with the wall and then cover the frame with trim. Instead of doing that, this time I added 1/8″ quarter round around the frames. This creates a simple, rounded trim that complements the Spanish Revival style.

On the bump-out windows I didn’t bother adding trim at the top and bottom and just added quarter round to the two sides.

I also made a small change to the front of the bump-out… I ripped off the cove molding between them (which I’d never really liked, but had used in a hurry because I didn’t have any quarter round at the time) and replaced it with quarter round. So now the edge is rounded instead of concave. It’s a subtle difference, but it makes me happy.

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Last week I bought this gorgeous Braxton Payne fireplace on eBay. It’s a limited edition from a 2007 convention in Fresno and the auction said it was half scale. I love Braxon’s fireplaces and own a few — including the Southwestern beehive fireplace in my quirky Spanish Revival artist’s cottage — but I’d never seen this one before and I couldn’t pass it up. I snagged it for $28 with Buy It Now (which is comparable to the prices on his website).

I’m usually careful not to buy miniatures online without knowing the dimensions or at least seeing a ruler in the photo. In the seconds before I hit the “buy” button it occurred to me that this might not really be half scale, but I didn’t want to risk missing out on it by asking the seller for dimensions and having someone else buy it while I waited for the answer. What were the chances it wouldn’t really be half scale?

100%, apparently.

I didn’t try to return it or even mention the error to the seller, because I still love this little fireplace. I’ve never done quarter scale before but I do have a Villa kit (now retired) in my stash that’s been waiting about 12 years for me to work up the nerve to build it. That house has a Spanish feel and I think this fireplace could look good in it. So I’ll hold onto the quarter scale fireplace, and gaze lovingly at it every now and then…

The fireplace mishap got me thinking about the artist’s cottage again. Even after I fixed the roof to the best of my ability, I had a hard time deciding on a trim that worked for the eaves. Initially I used stained half-round left over from the Little House in the Big Woods cabin.

That just wasn’t right. I pulled it off and replaced it with some of the chair rail trim I often use for half scale baseboards, painted to match the house. It was better, but still kind of funky.

After looking at a lot of pictures and real life roofs (we have an abundance of these in Northern California!), I decided to try again with cornice. This is Classics “small cornice” (#70272), and it’s been out of stock for months at every mini shop I tried. I had a piece in my stash that turned out to be just long enough.

On most of the roof sections, the tiles hang over the black matboard I used for the roof so it kind of looks like a shadow. This isn’t true on the roof over the bump-out window, and I didn’t like how obvious that black edge looked. I added some skinny trim (leftover window mullions) to the top edge of the cornice, to hide the black edge of the matboard. This also helped me mask that the roof was a bit crooked on one side of the bump-out.

I think this looks much better than either of the other two attempts.

(The flooring had started pulling up, so I removed some of it and applied new glue — hence the clamps and paint jars weighting it down in the pic below.)

I mitered the corners so they barely wrap around. I like that it looks like a gutter. Maybe I’ll add a drainpipe somewhere.

Moving on! The trim isn’t even the subject of this blog. There are two big things left to do on this little house: the side addition and the sleeping loft. Both are in progress but the loft’s waiting on something to show up in the mail, so let’s start with the addition.

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