I keep adding doodads and curlicues to the front of the Queen Anne Rowhouse. It’s like an obsession. After I added the panels and resin trim to the bay window, the house felt kind of unbalanced, with too many dark green stripes at the bottom and none at the top. I rectified this by adding a small piece of cove trim to the bottom of the vine trim.

After cutting the pieces to size, I painted them with Mossy Green and glued them in.

Next I wanted to add some dark green to the top portion of the house. I thought about doing panels similar to the ones on the bay, but didn’t really trust myself to cut trim pieces that would make neat triangles, so I looked around for triangular trim pieces that I could paint and glue on.

I found a great eBay shop, Victorian Doll House Wood Works, that sells all sorts of laser cut trim in 1:12 and 1:24 scale. (They also have a website.) I ordered a set of corner brackets to go on either side of the upper window. I got two sets, one for the front of the house and one for the back.

These are supposed to be 1:12 scale, but they work well to fill up the blank space on either side of the window. The “apex trim” at the top is 1:12 porch trim from LaserTech, which I bought at the dollhouse store before I discovered the eBay seller. In retrospect I might have preferred something frillier, like this, but it seems silly to spend the extra money when the ones I already bought work fine. (Especially considering that I’ve probably spent $200+ on the front of this house already…)

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When we last saw the Queen Anne Rowhouse, she was wearing a big green stripe that wasn’t exactly flattering. (You know what they say about horizontal stripes…) Today I turned this into three self-contained panels. This was a simple matter of cutting a few more vertical trim pieces, and cutting the corners of the horizontal pieces into 45-degree angles.

I painted the new pieces and glued them all on.

Chair rail might not have been the best choice for these, because the rounded trim didn’t meet nicely at the corners. I masked off the pieces and used wood filler to fill in the cracks at the corners, and where the panels met each other.

Then painted the filled parts, being careful not to get paint where it didn’t belong…

And voila, three panels! I like it!

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While I’m waiting for my new lights to arrive, I’ve gone back to work on the front of the rowhouse. I want this to look more or less like a San Francisco painted lady, and at the beginning of this project I spent a lot of time poring over library books to get ideas for how I could decorate the front of the house.

First up: windows. I’m using two window styles, a traditional window with a crown molding-like pediment on the bay window, and bonnet pediment windows everywhere else. Here they are during painting… that’s a lot of painting!

I can’t really complain, because painting these is much quicker than 1:12 windows and the acrylic is removable, so I don’t dread it as much as on certain other projects that will remain nameless…

Here’s the front of the house with the windows in. Pretty, but awfully plain compared to a real painted lady.

I got some floral resin molding to use on the eaves of the house. I tried painting the flowers and vines, similar to how I did the resin molding on the porch, but didn’t like how it was turning out. So I decided to paint the whole piece with Olivewood and be done with it.

Originally I only planned to use two pieces of molding, but decided to add a third piece at the bottom. Here’s the basic idea (with the new piece not painted yet!)

And I used the same trim around the bottom of the bay, being careful to match up the design at the seams.

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