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Gull Bay – paint and dormers

With the Rosedale 99% finished and the Rowhouse done except for shingles and a few other finishing touches, I gave myself permission to move onto a new mini project. I bought the Gull Bay Cottage about a year ago on eBay. It’s a half scale house based on the Millie August “pull apart” houses that were sold in the 1980s.

The original owner was a woman in her 80s who was downsizing her collection of “someday” projects. The house was already assembled, and very nicely sided, when I received it. It came with an instruction sheet that suggested the house would be decorated as part of a class, but mine never was (although all the windows doors etc. came included). I emailed Jackie Kerr Deiber, creator of the house, to try to get more info about it, and she wrote back:

“Gull Bay was available in the Millie August line of 1/144th scale houses made by Craft Publications. I also had it available in 1/2″ and 1/4″ scale. It could be purchased at different times in kit form, class, or exterior finished by me. It was meant to slide open so it could be also interior finished.”

I started by painting the front half with a coat of yellow Clark & Kensington paint named “Sunny Lemon,” that I got for free at Ace Hardware a couple of years ago. It’s more subtle than I expected, almost a custard color, but that’s fine. I didn’t want something too yellow.

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Rosedale bathroom part deux – fixtures, mirrors, and drains

When I left off on the Rosedale bathroom it was in need of some hardware and mirrors. This is a set of two taps and a sink pipe made by Dijon Miniatures. (This set is currently available for a great price on eBay.) I planned to use the taps for my two sinks, and the sink pipe turned upside down for a showerhead.

Because the taps are meant to stick into holes and there was no way I could drill a hole in my bathroom wall at this point, I bought some silver barrel beads and glued the taps into them, thinking this would create a more stable surface that I could then glue to the wall.

It was a sound idea, but I couldn’t manage to glue them to the wall. The room is only 3″ wide and there just wasn’t enough space for me to get my fingers in and hold the fixture in place while it dried. Even Super Glue didn’t work. (But it did stick my fingers together!) Instead, I cut a piece of wood to serve as a backsplash for the vanity, and glued the fixtures to this. Much better.

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Rosedale – finishing up interior trim

This is kind of a boring topic but I feel like I skipped over a step in documenting my final days on the Rosedale. Over the last month or so I got in all the windows and added some trim below the wallpaper borders that I think makes a big difference. So, here are those pictures. You’ve been warned.

I don’t know what it is about this house… maybe after working on the Rowhouse with its Houseworks components I’m out of practice with the smaller, more delicate pieces of a Greenleaf laser cut kit… but I had a terrible time getting these windows in. First I had to cut out acetate and glue it to the frames without getting glue all over the windows, which is something I’ve never been good at. (I didn’t use the acetate that came with the kit because I wanted clear windows without the decorative design.) I added little pieces of strip wood below the sills, and it was easy enough to glue these pieces of wood together but for whatever reason, the window frames didn’t want to stick to the walls. With ceiling heights less than 5″ tall and no window hole to stick your hand through for leverage (because it’s now covered up with acetate), this was not an easy job.

When cutting the wallpaper for the 2nd story family room, I apparently got over zealous and cut too long of a hole on one of the windows. The sill didn’t entirely cover it so I patched this with a small piece of leftover wallpaper.

Here’s how it looks with the window sill up. You’d never notice it unless you knew to look for it, but it was driving me crazy at the time. Then I totally forgot about it until I saw these pictures, so mission accomplished I guess.

With the windows in, I turned my attention to the border in the master bedroom, which I’ve disliked ever since I put it up. I had some floral border left over from the Rosedale stairwell that went well color-wise with the green paper in the master bedroom, so I used that to cover up the border I didn’t like.

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