With the downstairs part of the porch finished, I moved on to the top. I wanted to turn this into a balcony, but with something more flamboyant than the usual newel post. This is one of those times that a dearth of half scale supplies caused me to get creative.

For the posts, I bought a piece of 5/16″ square strip wood, and cut four 1″ lengths. For finials on top, I perused the well-stocked spindle/turnings aisle at Dollhouses, Trains, and More and picked out a package of Shenandoah 3/4″ spindles. Can’t find them online so I have no idea if they’re even made anymore (if yes, they’d be Houseworks brand since Houseworks acquired Shenandoah a while back), but they’re similar to these.

Rather than cut down the spindles to give them flat bottoms, I thought it would be more stable to drill holes in the posts and glue the spindles into the holes. Geoff helped with this, using his drill press.

Here’s the basic idea. (These spindles would make good bowling pins, too!)

I painted the posts with Baked Scone, and used Mossy Green on the spindles and a skinny piece of strip wood to use as trim around the tops of the posts.

Initially I only planned to paint the trim, but after gluing it on I realized it would look better to paint the whole top of the post green, too. This would have been easier if I’d painted the tops before gluing in the spindles, but why do it the easy way when you can do it the hard way?!

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When I bought the Queen Anne rowhouse, it had pillars made out of dowels that were sort of crookedly glued onto the railings. When I pulled these off, bumpy glue spots were left behind on the railings. I sanded them but was left with not-quite-flat railings, and was concerned that the new pillars wouldn’t glue onto them nicely. So, first I glued stripwood onto the tops of the railings to make a nice flat surface.

I also cut a new porch roof since the one that came with the house also had glue globs on it, and was a bit warped. Then I got to painting the porch roof and pillars.

I thought about painting the railings with Olivewood, but in the end went with the same Baked Scone as the rest of the stairs. (Having the stairs and railings the same color as the house seems common on the San Francisco Victorians.) For the pillars, I did Mossy Green at the top and bottom with Olivewood accents on the “rings.”

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I’ve been playing around with paint colors for the Queen Anne Rowhouse. I’m trying to keep the colors sort of subtle because that’s what a library book told me to do. (Apparently garish paint schemes are no longer “in” in San Francisco, and I’m not really a fan of garish anyway.) I had some Glidden paint samples that I thought would look good with the Behr Baked Scone I used for the house.

(These are very roughly painted, so ignore the messy lines!)

These colors are Slate Green, Smoky Mauve, and Behr Sandstone Cove. For some reason it didn’t sing to me. Too pastel.

Went back to the drawing board, this time with two shades of (not pastel) green. The lighter green is Glidden Olivewood and the darker one is Mossy Green. I like this a lot better. In this photo the white is still Sandstone Cove, but I ended up replacing that with the Baked Scone I’m using for the house, which is an off-white with a very faint hint of tan. The Sandstone Cove was too stark. (I didn’t bother taking a comparison picture because the shades are so similar, I’m not sure you’d be able to tell the difference…)

I’m not pleased with the quality of the wood on these windows. I like Houseworks windows because they usually look nice out of the box without needing sanding, etc., but in this batch the wood is really “chewed up”. Not sure you can tell in the pictures but it’s very obvious in person—a lot of crumbs on the wood that I wasn’t able to sand off, and the right side of every bonnet (where it slopes back down after the peak) is also very rough. I did the best I could painting them and hope it won’t be too obvious when they’re on the house. Normally I would have painted the inner stripe of the windows a contrasting color but because of the chewed-up-ness it looked terrible, so I decided to go with Olivewood for the whole frame instead.

Next, I started working on trim on the front of the house. I bought decorative resin trim to use under the eaves, along with some corner trim and stripwood to cover the raggedy edges of the siding.

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