This past week I made good progress on the Gull Bay, and the exterior’s almost done. I have a ton of pictures so I’ll break them up into two posts.

The house came with “lattice” that appears to be made from stiff plastic needlepoint canvas cut on a diagonal. The photo of the completed house doesn’t have lattice and I’ve never been able to find any other pics of this dollhouse online, so I don’t know if it was originally included with the house or something the woman I bought it from planned to add on her own. The front part of the foundation was painted black when I got it — the only paint on the whole house.

I Googled for pictures of real life lattice and found that it’s often white, framed by another color. I decided to paint my lattice the same Raw Cotton off-white as the trim, and frame it with the Sunny Lemon house color.

Though the lattice was white to begin with, in the photo below you can sort of see the difference between the original white (bottom) and the Raw Cotton (top).

In the photo the porches and corner trim are white (trim color) but I decided to make mine yellow like the house.

The porch posts, railings, and apex trim I painted my off-white white trim color. I got the apex trim off eBay for my Queen Anne Rowhouse and ended up not using it. The railings are 1:12 widow’s walk fencing. Apparently these also come in white, which would have made my life easier because the black took three coats of paint to cover up. I don’t know if the spikes were cut off or if there’s a version of this fencing without spikes.

The porch floor was a bit warped, so I clamped it during gluing, putting a piece of wax paper against it so the clamps wouldn’t leave marks.

Sorry for the fuzzy picture, but here’s the apex trim. The curve complements the arch below it well.

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Painting windows: not my favorite thing to do. The Gull Bay has nine of them, plus the door frame, plus the three dormer windows I added to the back. I actually skipped the dormers with this batch for reasons I’ll explain below, but over Memorial Day weekend I forced myself to do the rest of them using an off-white paint named Raw Cotton that I’ve had a pint of for years and years.

A poor seal on the paint can has led to evaporation, which meant the paint was somewhat gloppy — making this process even more fun!

The three windows on the front of the house are the Victorian style, and the plexiglass slides out on a track. The rest of the windows are “traditional” style and the plexi is held in with little wooden sticks on the inside. (Joy, more pieces to paint!) I think this is my first time using this particular style of window, so I don’t know if they’re still like this or if the ones I got with the Gull Bay are an older version that’s since been upgraded to the plexiglass that slides out–a distinct possibility, since this kit is from the eighties or early nineties.

The sticks are slightly larger than the mullions that inexplicably come with Houseworks windows. (I say inexplicably because how often do people actually use those? I have *so many* leftover mullions.)

I thought the sticks would hold the windows in with pressure, but they’re not quite snug enough. I put glue only on the side that butts up against the window frame and not on the side that butts up against plexiglass, to prevent accidentally smearing it on the windows.

I really like the blue/gray shingles and decided to use that stain on the front door and shutters, rather than coming up with another accent color. One benefit of this is that it’s much easier to stain shutters than paint the slats nicely. The house only came with three sets of shutters, for the three Victorian windows on the front, but I decided to add them to all the windows — so I would have had 18 shutters to paint…

Staining these things can be challenging since there might be glue spots (not my fault, at least!) or the basswood just might not take stain evenly. I had to do several coats to get them to look more blue than see-through gray, but I do like how the wood shows through a little. The door and a few shutters had some stubborn spots that wouldn’t stain, which I hid by lightly dry-brushing on paint of a similar color.

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