In one week (gasp!) I will be moving back to San Francisco and leaving the suburbs behind. The past six weeks have been busy with packing and de-cluttering and moving things to the (considerably smaller) new house, including everything that once lived in my beloved dollhouse workshop. The new house doesn’t have a dedicated dollhouse room yet — although Geoff promises we can create one in the garage someday — so for now there are a bazillion bins filled with furniture and supplies and the houses are all over the place. It’s pretty overwhelming.

(If you’re wondering, this is what the staged dollhouse room looked like when we put the house on the market. It *never* looked this nice the entire time I lived here. I spent about two hours cleaning paint off the sink and tabletop and then the woman staging the house walked in and said “Oh, you washed off all those paint spatters! I thought they were cute!” Grr.)

Anyway. Before packing up all my stuff, I finished a few projects that were close to being done, thinking that if the stuff stays packed for months/years (noooo!) it would be too hard to pick up where I’d left off. One of those projects was the windows on the Spanish revival artist’s cottage. But before I get to that, I have to go back even further, because I never posted a follow-up to my questionable barrel tile roof, finished almost a year ago.

Among other things, I was unhappy with how the top row of the back part of the roof looked. I had replaced an entire row of tiles to cover up some that had melted from glue, and didn’t like how obvious that replacement row was.

In an attempt to blend in the patch job a bit better, I cut several varied lengths of tile to add to the back roof, and theoretically make the top replacement row less noticeable.

After painting and gluing on the new pieces of tile, I added wood filler to the tiles under the replacement row to make the gap less obvious.

Here’s how it looked before I added the washes.

And after. There’s still something funky about it but I think it looks more like an old roof and less like a styrene hack-job now.

Unfortunately, as you can see on two of the bottom tiles, the paint still scrapes off incredibly easily. I also dinged some putting the house into the car to move it to San Francisco, so whenever the new dollhouse workshop materializes the roof is going to need another touch-up. This is probably my last time using styrene tiles…

Moving on to the original purpose of this blog… windows! The gatorboard shell came with three windows cut into it and I added three skylights to the roof. These are all Houseworks 12-light windows.

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