I decided to “save myself some work” by using Houseworks staircases in the Victorianna, instead of building the kit stairs. I don’t know if it really saved me any work, but the first floor stairs are finally finished and they look good!

I started by gluing strip wood to the side of the staircase, to make up for the prefab stairs being slightly narrower than the kit stairs. Then I glued the staircase assembly to the wall, using clamps to hold it in as it dried.

Possibly because the kit pieces are slightly warped, the staircase is not quite at a 45-degree angle and a little crooked. At the bottom, it overhangs a tiny bit into the space where the back wall will be, so I’ll have to sand down the strip wood there to allow a good fit. The crookedness shouldn’t be noticeable once everything’s put together, however you can see that the bottom four stairs are slightly off from the stair cutout built into the wall.

The bottom two were the worst, and I cut pieces of strip wood to add to the fronts to mask the discrepancy.

Next I got to work on the treads. I couldn’t use the ones that come with the stair kits, because the bottom four need to be slightly wider, and the rest of them won’t have spindles and therefore don’t need the pre-drilled spindle hole. (If I were painting them maybe I could have filled the holes with wood filler, but I’m doing dark stained treads.) I went to the dollhouse store looking for strip wood the same dimensions of the tread — 1/16″ thick and 7/16″ wide — and, guess what, that dimension doesn’t exist in commercially available strip wood. Bah.

I bought a grab bag of 1/32″ black walnut veneer off eBay thinking I could use it for both the staircase treads and the hardwood floors. Turns out it’s not going to work for the floors (more details here) but it worked for the treads. Since the wood is half the thickness of the original staircase treads, I cut two pieces for each tread and glued them together.

Then I stained the treads with Minwax Natural, which enhanced the dark color of the wood.

I cut these with scissors and ended up with some not-quite-straight edges due to the grain, but they’re close enough to being square, especially considering they’ll be very hard to see once the house is put together.

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If I’m moving at a snail’s pace with the back-to-back Victorianna, it’s only because this house requires so much thinking! Once it’s put together, some spaces (like the staircase) are inaccessible, so I have to do everything I want to do there before I put the back on. But, some spaces (like the hallways that link the two sides of the house) need to be finished once both sides of the house are assembled, to avoid seams and obvious gaps where the two kits meet.

So, a lot of the time between my last post and now has been spent just trying to wrap my head around what needs to be done, in what order. Last time I closed with epoxying the piece that will allow me to alter the roof line. Here’s how it turned out. After taking it out of the jig, Geoff did some sanding to neaten up the edges where the epoxy squeezed through.

The other side, which was against a piece of wax paper, actually came out cleaner. It looks messy but the epoxy dried smooth.

Since this house is made to hang on the wall, the back piece has two holes to hang it from. In the regular plywood kit these are punch-outs so I left the pieces “punched in”, but in the birch plywood version the holes came already punched out.

To fill the hole, I found a dowel the right size.

I cut off a skinny piece, glued it in, and then sanded it flat. I would have liked to do this with the other hole but some glue had squeezed through when I glued the two back pieces together and dried there, so the dowel wouldn’t fit. On that side I used wood filler (which took several coats since the hole was really too deep for wood filler).

Now, time to defile my nice epoxyed-in piece by cutting it up! I wanted to connect the two sides of the third floor with a hall lined up above the hallways I cut downstairs, but that would have left the back piece with a big gap all the way up the middle and I was concerned about stability.

Instead, I decided to put a door farther to the left. This will be the master bedroom and the door leads to the master bath. I’ll probably make it a “Jack and Jill” bath with another door off the bathroom leading to the rest of the third floor on the other side of the house.

Geoff used the jigsaw again to cut the hole for me. I promised this would be the last one for a while.

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