I’ve finally reached the point on the Victorianna where I can glue on the front roof pieces. Yay, progress!
My plan was to add fishscale shingles to the top portions of the towers. I got these from Alpha Stamps.
I don’t know why, but even though it looked great in my head, I hated this once I saw it. The scale of the shingles is fine but they seem too big and chunky somehow — more like a dragon’s back than a pretty Victorian detail. I let it sit like that overnight just in case I changed my mind, but the next day I still hated it. Luckily the chipboard shingles were easy to rip off!
On to Plan B (which didn’t exist yet). I hadn’t prepared the plywood with the intention of having it show, so the towers needed to be covered up with something. Adding siding seemed like a pain because of all the seams — I’ve never been very good at cutting straight edges on clapboard siding, and the siding I have on hand is brittle and splits easily. I knew it wouldn’t look good.
The beadboard I used inside on the bathroom wall was easier to work with, but when I held it up against the tower wall the grooves seemed way too small.
So I ended up buying some 1/4″ board and batten siding from Miniatures.com. Since the grooves run vertically, the corners will be much easier to deal with than they would have been with clapboard siding — I’ll just butt the pieces up next to each other and fill in the seams with wood filler.
Whenever possible I like to swap out the windows on a die-cut dollhouse with Houseworks windows, or at least make my own trim as I did on the tower’s bay windows, but that’s easier said than done when the window has a non-standard shape. I wasn’t excited about using the window trim that came with the kits. Compared to the bay windows underneath, the oval trim seems clunky and way out of scale.