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Finishing the Fairfield bathroom

It’s been years since I did anything with the Fairfield. It sits on a table at the top of the stairs and I stop and look at it now and then, but besides adding new accessories on occasion, it doesn’t change much. I (more or less) finished the Fairfield in 2010, and all this time, have been meaning to add a shower to the bathroom but never got around to it.

Miniatures.com recently started carrying these beige tiles that are a good size for half scale. I ordered them out of curiosity and, once they arrived, decided to use them for the Fairfield’s shower. What could go wrong?

This is a narrow room and I had a hard time getting my hand in. That’s probably why I put this off so long. I started by cutting a piece of the tile sheet and putting it in to see how it looks. I had to be careful not to knock into the light and damage it (something I have done before trying to get paper into narrow, tiny rooms).

Because the crown molding and baseboards are already in, after seeing how it fit I had to cut some tile off the bottom so it would butt up against the molding. The room isn’t square (probably due to the floor piece being warped), so that made it a bit tricky to cut the sheet just right.

I didn’t like the random non-uniform tiles, so I cut plain tiles off the rest of the sheet and covered the random ones up. In this picture I’ve done it to one tile on the left – can you spot it?!

Here it is with all of them covered. I didn’t bother with the ones at the bottom since you won’t be able to see them behind the tub.

Okay, first mistake. This is “peel and stick” tile and I thought that applying it with the sticky backing would be neater than covering it with glue, since the room is such a tight fit (didn’t want to smear glue on the light or the other walls). I was wrong. It kept sticking in the wrong places as I tried to slide it in and when I pulled it back out, it took some wallpaper with it. No turning back now…

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Tomy Smaller Homes living room

Continuing with the Tomy dollhouse renovation, the first room I put back together was the living room, starting with the wrinkled wallpaper. Third time’s a charm?

First I removed the offending wallpaper. The glue had dried by this point but I got the remnants off with Goo Gone and a razor blade, like before. The lacquer thinner I used to remove the Goo Gone residue took off some of the color, but it’ll be covered up.

When the roof piece slides over the wall piece, the added bulk of the wallpaper makes for too tight a fit. That’s why it kept getting wrinkled; the roof piece was pushing down the top of the wallpaper. I decided to put the wall back in place first and then glue in the paper. That way I could get the top of the wallpaper exactly flush with the edge of the roof piece, without the wallpaper having to be underneath the roof piece.

I cut a new piece of wallpaper leaving plenty of excess so I could cut it to fit once the house was reassembled. Then I cut the top angle.

I put the house back together, lined up the top of the paper so the slanted edge butts right up against the roof edge. The bottom is able to slide beneath the floor without any issues but I needed to cut out the right corner to accommodate the fireplace, so I marked where the cut should be and did that before gluing in the paper once and for all.

Like in the rest of the house, it looked perfectly smooth initially but dried with some bubbles. I’m beyond worrying about that. C’est la vie.

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Ducks and more ducks

Every year like clockwork, ducks show up in my swimming pool. They hang out for about six weeks, hatch a gaggle of babies, and then waddle off into the sunset–with a little help, because once baby ducks get in the pool they can’t get out again.

This year, it happened twice: one pair of ducks showed up in February, and a week after their ducklings hatched in April, another pair moved in.

The first batch had six babies.

After six years of this, we have duck rescue down to a science: first fish them out with the pool net, then deposit them near the fence so they can jump through to the other side.

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