Soon after painting two windows and a door for the Hillside Victorian, the lack of consistency among their pediments started to bother me. I bashed the door together and the pediment isn’t exactly the same as on the Houseworks Victorian windows, but it’s very close. However the pediment on the small window (also a Houseworks Victorian window, mind you) is different than the rest and it was sticking out like a sore thumb. I decided to bash one of the full sized windows into a small window, to make it consistent with the others.

The Victorian windows Houseworks sells now come with the window sill detached and the acrylic removable for easier painting. The house came with a bunch of older style windows that don’t have these handy features, but I did have one of the newer styles, so this is what I used. Since the sill was already detached, cutting down the sides was easy. Not wanting to cut too much accidentally, I erred on the side of caution to start.

I used the disc sander to sand the sides down, checking the fit every so often. One of the sides broke off the window in the process but it was a clean break, so not a problem.

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King Midas got his hands on the Hillside Victorian today. But first, I finished up the front door. This morning I bought a piece of strip wood that’s the same width as the blue stripes on the windows. (It pays to have a miniature store in the neighborhood!)

And here’s the end result. The shoulder thingies could stand to be a bit longer to match up better with the windows, but I think it turned out pretty good for something that was cobbled together.

The other thing I’ve been working on for the past few weeks, which only started looking impressive today, are pieces of trim to cover up the paint mess where two colors meet. I’m using small crown molding at the edges of the white panels on the bay windows. (Actually, it’s “picture frame,” but it’s essentially the same thing as crown molding.) This creates a nice clean line and gives the house’s relatively plain trim a little oomph.

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As I’ve mentioned numerous times I’m not a fan of detail work, but the Hillside Victorian is just screaming out for Victorian details, and who am I to refuse?

Most of the windows on this house are Houseworks Victorian windows, and I’m painting accent colors similar to how I did the Fairfield’s windows. At 1:12, these are somewhat easier to paint neatly than the half scale windows were, but they still take a while… two coats of white, then two coats of the blue with a small chisel brush, then another round (or two) of white touch-ups to fix where the blue got outside the lines. I’ve only done these two so far.

And here they are on the house. (Here’s a close-up shot.) Two down, eight to go!

Because most of the Hillside Victorian’s windows have the Victorian pediment, I wanted the front door to match. Houseworks sells a Victorian style door (I have it on the Fairfield), but the house came with a nice old door with an etched glass window (upside-down in this picture!) that I wanted to use. Also, if I’d bought the Victorian door, the hole would have needed to be enlarged, and that would have been too tricky to reach with the porch and railing already glued in.

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