For a house whose inside you can barely see through the windows, I spent an awful lot of time on interior trim… When the pieces slide together, there’s enough “slop” on the sides to allow for baseboards on the side walls. At the bottom, I used a piece of strip wood the same width as […]
Tag: Half scale (Page 14 of 21)
Interior trim: booooring to work on, but exciting to apply since the rooms look so complete once it’s in. It’s also the last task I have to do to finish up the Gull Bay. I already posted pictures of the downstairs crown molding and baseboards in my last blog. For the upstairs rooms, I pulled […]
With the Gull Bay’s exterior finished, all that remains is interior trim. Since this house will be displayed fully closed up, the only view in is through the windows, so you really only get a glimpse. Because of this I considered not bothering with molding and baseboards but the house felt unfinished to me without […]
I have this tendency, as I get close to finishing part of a dollhouse, to start messing with the thing that’s finished and totally fine the way it is. Usually I’m glad I messed with it. Occasionally I curse myself for getting ambitious and screwing it up when it was perfectly fine already. I’m not […]
With the Gull Bay’s chimneys in, I was able to finish shingling the front of the house. The seam where the shingles meet is, well, not perfect. Also the rows get kind of crookedy near the top. Eh, I did my best. (Or maybe not my best, but the best I felt like doing. Shingling […]
While waiting for a replacement trim piece to come in the mail, I took a break from the Gull Bay porch to do the chimneys. The chimneys are made from blocks of wood, and get covered with the same vinyl brick sheet as the foundation. Skinny trim pieces go over the corners to cover the […]
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 […]
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 […]
The Gull Bay has been sitting for a while, and before that I made some progress that I never blogged about. I pulled the house out again last weekend so now need to play catch-up on the blog. For starters, the wallpaper is now finished. I’m papering this house with white scrapbook paper, since the […]
The Rosedale’s landscaping is more or less complete, so here are pictures of the finished product! But first, a list of handy links to the earlier landscaping entries, that show how we got here: Making the Base | Laying the Patio | Adding Greenery | Finishing the Patio
The final stage of landscaping the Rosedale involved finishing the patio and adding a fence. The patio is made from “slate” (actually, plaster) flagstones. They’re textured with very slight color variation that seemed too dull to me, so I decided to spruce them up using the same technique I’ve used in the past with egg […]
With the patio glued down, it’s time to get some greenery into the Rosedale’s yard. The other two dollhouses I’ve landscaped, the Fairfield and the puzzle house, had very colorful gardens with lots of different kinds of plants. For the Rosedale, my mom and I decided on a more subtle look, mostly green with only […]
With the base finished, the next step in Rosedale landscaping was gluing down the patio. I don’t attach my houses to the base permanently, but I do glue down the landscaping elements, so I had to measure carefully and make sure the patio was properly centered. When I first pulled out these flagstones, I intended […]
This past weekend, my parents visited and I pulled out the Rosedale so we could landscape it together. (My mom is a gardener with a good sense of how to lay out a garden, and my dad’s a woodworker who’s good at things like building swiveling dollhouse bases. They helped me landscape the Fairfield a […]
I love the detail accessories add to a mini scene but don’t usually have the patience to make my own. That’s why I love participating in the Half Scale Yahoo Group‘s annual swap — I end up with dozens of accessories that I theoretically could have made myself, but never would. I just found homes […]
For the second year in a row I participated in the Half Scale Yahoo Group swap. Last year the theme was “treasures in the attic” and I made record albums. This year the voting was very close between “shabby chic” and “kitchens” and since I have several kitchens that need to be filled up, that […]
Satisfied with my last experience shopping at Shapeways, I placed another order a few weeks ago. Pretty Small Things had just added some office type furniture to their shop including a file cabinet, which is an item I’d been wanting for the Rosedale’s home office. While I was at it I also ordered an industry […]
A few weeks ago, when Geoff helped me cut holes for the dormers I’m adding to the Gull Bay, I had him cut rectangles. The Houseworks front-opening Victorian, which I have in my stash, uses the same kind of dormer and it comes with a rectangular hole, so I figured that was the way to […]
Since the Gull Bay is enclosed and the inside will mostly be viewed through the windows, I wanted to keep the interior light and simple so it’s easy to see the furniture. I decided to use bright white scrapbook paper for the best possible illumination inside. I’ve never been very good at papering dormers. Initially […]
In a continuation of the easiest electricity ever, I added the ceiling lights to the downstairs rooms of the Gull Bay cottage. Normally with a ceiling light I would snip off the plug, drill a small hole in the ceiling, and run the wire to the floor above. But with the Gull Bay I wanted […]
Emily is a freelance writer, miniaturist, and adventure game enthusiast.
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