Work has stalled on the Turret House since I last posted about it in October. That’s partly because we had a ginormous storm at the end of October and my workshop flooded. I didn’t take a “before” picture (since I was frantically moving things out of the way before they got wet), but here’s the “after”…

(This picture isn’t nearly as dramatic as it was with water all over the floor!)

Thankfully the flood wasn’t caused by a leak, but by water that blew in underneath the door. The floor isn’t level and it’s lower on the side Rosy’s standing on, so the water pooled on that side. A few cardboard boxes that were stashed under the wooden workbench got damaged, but I was able to get the contents out of the boxes before what was inside was ruined.

I quickly moved everything that was on that side of the room to the dry side, which required “putting away” a lot of what I had in progress for the Turret House. “Putting away” is in quotes because I just tossed it all in boxes or stashed it on the desk and everything in progress that had been “carefully organized” (again in quotes!) was now in places where it shouldn’t have been, and hard to find later.

Long story short, this disrupted my flow on the Turret House and I’m only dipping my toes back in now. (Metaphorically, not literally! Geoff installed a storm door, which seems to have solved the water problem.)

The other reason I got distracted from the Turret House is that I started working on my items for the annual half scale swap. But I can’t show those off until March or so, so pretend I didn’t say anything about swaps.

Anyway, as of last weekend I’m back to work on the Turret House, and although I haven’t made major progress, it’s been such a long time since I posted that I figured I might as well. First up, the foundation.

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Continuing with the floral trim, I wanted to add it to the bump-out on the side of the house. I did this on my original Queen Anne Rowhouse, but painted the roof instead of shingling it.

This time I decided to shingle the roof. Not my best work.

The problem here was that I measured the first two rows, but I eyeballed the top row. These are partial shingles and I should have cut off a bit more so the spacing between rows would look more uniform.

I thought I could fix it by adding one more row of shingles at the top, but that might have made it worse?

Here’s how it looks with the trim.

In hindsight I wish I’d mitered these corners. When I originally cut the pieces, I had *just* enough and couldn’t be picky about where in the design the side pieces came from. I figured there was no point in mitering the corners if the designs wouldn’t match up anyway. But since I ended up buying more trim, I should have cut new side pieces, matched up the designs, and mitered those corners. Alas.

This is a piece of roof trim I had left over. I originally bought this for the Victorianna but ended up not using it, and then I cut the tips off of some of it to use on the front facade. The remaining piece is just long enough to fit here.

Luckily, I never throw anything away! Before I decided not to use this on the Victorianna, I had cut a few small pieces that I saved. This gave me enough for the two side edges. I painted the trim gold.

But I don’t think gold is right. Maybe it should be blue? Since this is similar to a railing, I’m going to hold off on finishing this until I do the railings. I think the railings will be blue, but not 100% sure yet.

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