After building the deck for the Hillside Victorian, I wasn’t sure how to finish it. I thought it should match the hot tub, but didn’t want too much brown to detract from the color scheme of the rest of the house (especially since there’s no brown or stained wood anywhere else). So, I turned to the internet for inspiration.

I really like how the flagstone foundation turned out, and wondered if there was a way to continue that for the deck. Initially I was thinking I would paint the deck gray (using one of the stone colors) and add lattice underneath it. I’m not sure anymore what search terms I used, but a Google image search along these lines turned up this image:

I’m not sure what makes a deck a deck, and a porch a porch, but who cares? After seeing this picture, I really liked the idea of extending the flagstone foundation around the base of the deck. I decided to paint the deck white, which is the trim color and also the color of the front stairs and other deck-like areas on the front of the house.

When assembling the deck, I left a gap between boards as advised by the instructions. I tried filling these with paint but the gaps were too big (as you can see at the top of the picture above). So I filled the gaps with wood filler (you can see the first several filled rows at the bottom of the photo).

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After completing the Hillside Victorian’s hot tub, I turned my attention to the deck. I’m using an old kit from Betty’s Wooden Miniatures. The dollhouse store had it marked down from $50 to $30 because they weren’t sure if all the pieces were there.

Since I was planning to bash the hot tub into the deck, I thought about just buying strip wood coming up with my own design, but $30 seemed reasonable for the amount of wood that came with it and a set of basic instructions to follow. Plus, there used to be a version of the kit that came with a hot tub and those instructions were included, so I figured that would make the bashing that much easier.

The first step was to build four supports, to be distributed evenly across the MDF base.

Since mine would have a hot tub in the corner, the stairs wouldn’t extend all the way across the deck, so I only built three of these.
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