My back-to-back Victorianna will have three bedrooms besides the master, decorated for girls of various ages. The first one I’m working on is the front bedroom on the second floor – it’s on the mirror image side of the house, where the stairs would normally come up. The little girl who lives here is around four years old, with lots of toys!

I started by picking out wallpaper for the three rooms. The one in the middle is for this bedroom. The flowered wallpaper will go in the other second floor bedroom, and the safari paper in the nursery on the third floor.

I like the border but didn’t want it at the very top of the wall, for two reasons: 1) it would be partially covered up by crown molding, and 2) if it’s so high up, how can the girl who lives here appreciate it?! So, I started by cutting off the border with an Xacto knife.

I plan to put it lower on the wall — more at the occupant’s eye level.

This is the SDK Miniatures Gothic Wardrobe that forms part of the hallway wall, before I glued it in. I painted it with the Tuscan Beige trim color and added drawer pulls made from pink seed beads and pin heads.

Next I loaded it up with toys. Since the wardrobe is glued in permanently, I also glued in the toys with Tacky Glue to prevent things getting knocked over and needing fixing later. (Hopefully…) About half of these toys are Peruvian ceramic beads.

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Half scale dollhouses often need to be decorated as they’re built, or else you end up with spaces where it’s too hard to reach your hands in. I give you Exhibit A: the Victorianna’s upstairs hallway.

Because of how I’m bashing the house, this is a long skinny hallway that takes up the whole luan plywood half of the house and extends into the birch plywood half. The space is 2″ wide and about 9″ deep. The wall on the right is part of the structure, but I put off adding the one on the left until after I’d finished the hardwood floors and wallpapered the right wall.

Next I glued in the wardrobe that’s forming part of the left wall, and the wall itself. The ceiling isn’t glued in, it’s just there to hold them in place while the glue dries.

Here’s the hallway with both walls glued in. It’s starting to be a tight squeeze!

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Moving on to the second half of the Victorianna, here’s the back side of the part I built first, ready to get the back wall glued on.

The back wall was a bit warped so I used lots of clamps. I had previously glued together the back walls from the two Victorianna kits, so this piece is double thickness. I had to be careful not to get too much glue in the slots that would dry into glops and interfere with the tabs for the remaining walls and floors.

Here’s the half I’ve been working on, with the back attached.

Before gluing in walls and floors on the other side, I added a piece of wallpaper to the living room wall that wraps around above the fake closet door. I wanted to deal with this before the other walls were glued in, so I wouldn’t have to reach my hands in.

The wall the closet door is on isn’t quite flush with the walls perpendicular to it. I’m not sure if it was supposed to be this way but by the time I realized it, it was kind of too late to fix. I added a piece of basswood to add enough depth for the crown molding to attach. Then I cut and painted the crown, but didn’t glue it on yet since the ceiling paper from the other side of the house will overlap here.

Next I glued in the walls and first and second floor. During gluing I put the third floor in for stability, but didn’t glue it yet to make wallpapering the hallway and bedrooms easier.

Ta da – a double-wide house!

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