When I bought the Mansard Victorian, it didn’t have any interior door holes. The partitions weren’t glued in, so I could have cut holes in those, but I don’t like it when one room leads into another without a hallway in between. I have no problem building a house without a staircase or a bathroom, but I draw the line at attached rooms!

(Okay, it obviously depends on the house. Sometimes the rooms just have to flow that way. But I vehemently dislike it.)

Because this house is deep with a flat, windowless back wall, I decided to make false walls with doors on them, suggesting there’s a hallway behind them. I already have a staircase that goes nowhere, so why not doors that go nowhere?

As a treat, I bought some fancy Majestic Mansions Stannford doors for the rooms on the second and third floors.

Downstairs, I used a leftover third floor partition (which isn’t as deep as the others) to be a partial wall between the living room and the foyer. On the wall between the foyer and the kitchen, Geoff cut me a door hole.

I’m planning to decorate the kitchen and bathroom in a 1920s-ish style, with black and white floor tiles and subway tile backsplashes. As I was staring at the kitchen, thinking about how that will look, it seemed out of place compared to the the living room and foyer. Besides, I don’t think the people who live in this fancy, old-timey house would want the kitchen to be the first thing people see when they come in. It needs… a door!

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When I glued the false wall to the side of the house, the bulky wires behind the cardboard prevented it from gluing on flat. I added a few strategic squirts of super glue, which succeeded in holding the wall in place, but also caused me not to realize until too late that the false wall is slightly crooked.

On one side, there’s a gap big enough for a floorboard to slide under.

But on the other side, the cardboard is up against the floor. On this side the floor is also slightly too tall — probably because the cardboard subfloor I added wasn’t quite thick enough to make everything level — so the floorboard isn’t flush with the board across the threshold. I fixed this the best I could by sanding this side of the floor down with the mouse sander.

I knew I wanted the bay window floor to follow the (partial) octagon shape around the room, but had trouble visualizing how to do that. I made a paper template to help me understand what the angles needed to be where the boards met up.

I knew from previous octagonal endeavors that when the sides of the octagon are all the same size, two 37.5-degree angles meet up properly. But the walls on the bay window addition aren’t the same size — the one in the center is shorter than the ones on the sides. Also, the flat pieces between the walls were tripping me up.

So I decided to section off the area with a board butting up against each flat piece.

I glued these pieces in first. Having these as guides made it easier to cut the rest of them.

I started gluing from the back, only realizing when I got to the front that I would have ended up with a sliver of board at the front edge. This would have looked funny once the addition is in place, so I pulled those boards up and started again from the front.

(The cardboard residue is there because I was using boards that I had previously pulled up from the section of floor that had cardboard under it. Why throw away perfectly good floorboards?)

Now the sliver’s at the back, where it will be less obvious.

In the next section, I started from the back, leaving a sliver the same size as in the center section, and worked my way to the front.

And then I repeated that process on the other side.

Even after sanding with the mouse sander, the floor doesn’t slide in under the false wall on this side, so I left a little notch in the floorboards. Sloppy, but you won’t see it when the addition is in place.

Here’s how the floor looks with the addition up against the house.

I’m planning to use my Susan Holtege piano in here.

I don’t want to add trim to this doorway yet, because I’m not ready to glue in the built-in bookcase, and I’m not sure if I’ll be able to slide it in and out with the trim in place. I had already prepared trim for the staircase doorway, so I moved on to that instead.

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