The Den of Slack

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Tomy Smaller Homes renovation

Last summer I discovered a mouse had been squatting in my Tomy Smaller Homes dollhouse. I didn’t catch it in action (thankfully!), but my first clue was the chewed-up rug.

Then I noticed this suspicious stain. Mouse pee? It seems too symmetrical for that, but this is right against a seam where two carpet pieces meet, so that could explain the straight edge. (Also, ew!)

Also two loose wallpaper corners in the kitchen had been nibbled at. I tore off the damaged wallpaper intending to replace it.

After letting it sit in disrepair for almost a year, last week I decided to fix the damaged carpet and wallpaper. Not surprisingly, this turned into something bigger. It started with the living room carpet. I was able to get up this much of it before I decided I needed to take off the walls to really get it off.

This is two layers of paper backing — the suede scrapbook paper I used when I redid the house six years ago, and the remnants of the original carpet underneath that I hadn’t completely removed.

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Website makeover

I’ve been fiddling with my website the past few weeks, so apologies if you tried to visit during that time and things were messed up. Everything should be working now. If you notice something wonky, please let me know!

Quick rundown of the changes:

  • I moved to a new theme named Hemingway. My favorite thing about it is the rotating header image. Keep hitting refresh, it’s fun!
  • Previously, only my blog was hosted by WordPress and the rest of the pages were sad relics of my hand-coded website from the early 2000s. The whole site is now on WordPress and the old URLs should redirect to the new ones.
  • There’s a pretty dollhouse landing page with links to blog posts and galleries. Only some of them have galleries so far, and most those are linking off site to my galleries on the Greenleaf forum. My plan is to put together galleries for most of the houses and have them live here. That’ll take a little time to complete, but I’ve started with the Gull Bay Cottage.
  • Pre-2009 dollhouse projects are now part of the blog, including the McKinley, the Orchid, the early Fairfield entries, and the Tomy Smaller Homes dollhouse. This content already existed on my website but it’s hopefully easier to navigate now.
  • My blogs for two 2005 Greenleaf community projects, the Arthur and the Westville, are now on my site as well. This content was previously only posted on the Greenleaf forum.

A tale of two showers

I completed not one, but two half scale shower surrounds today — one for the Victorianna and one for the long-dormant Queen Anne Rowhouse. (Besides shingles, the bathroom is the last big thing I need to finish in the Rowhouse…)

For reference, here’s what I started with in the Victorianna:

And in the Rowhouse:

I bought plexiglass for the two showers from Tap Plastics, where they cut it down to size for me. I got one squarish piece for the Victorianna, which will have a fake door, and two tall skinny ones for the Rowhouse, which will have a working sliding door. The minimum price for a cut piece of plexiglass is $1 and the pieces I bought were small enough to fall under that threshold, so I ended up paying just $1 a piece, and after he finished cutting the guy let me have the leftover scraps for free.

This is one of those scraps. Geoff used the drill press to drill holes for the handles, and he practiced on this to make sure the plexiglass wouldn’t crack. I then used it to make sure I could glue in aluminum wire without making a big mess. Success on both counts!

Here are the two doors with handles. I glued in the handles by dabbing the ends in Super Glue before sticking them through the hole — it holds well and I managed to do it without smearing it all over the place. I chose to do horizontal handles on both of these so they can double as towel bars.

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