The Three Bears

The Three Bears have taken up residence in Lockwood Manor!

One is admiring the view out of the window - you can see much more than you could from the bear's old house in the woods!

Another has taken up residence in a little bed. I built the bed recently to replace the old crib, and put up some new pictures in the Nursery.

And lastly, the third bear is having a tea party with a mouse, a lovely glass animal from Italy.

Thank you to the wonderful friends who gave me the adorable animals!

A Nice Day For Washing

Why hello again! I had taken a break from writing on this blog to move forward with Marybelle's room, and I have a few exciting updates that I will post later on. Even though the scullery is one of the few rooms that are about 99% finished, I had been bothered by something that I hadn't been able to put my finger on for some time now. I realized that through the window in the scullery, you could see the white wall behind it. To fix this, I added some greenery and an image of a landscape I cut out of a magazine.

Now at least those who are washing the dishes will have a lovely view!

I just have to find the perfect washtub for the scullery now, and a few more things to put on the shelf to the right.

At the very least, it seems to be a nice day at Lockwood Manor!

I am hoping to be back soon with an update on Lockwood Manor, so you see you then!

A Slanted Ceiling Saga

Hello! It's certainly been a long time since I last posted, but I have managed to do some work on Marybelle's room. Before I started to wallpaper, I had to remove the old wallpaper that I had glued on before.

After I had removeed most of the wallpaper, I glued in a piece of wood that would add a slant to the ceiling to make it more attic-like. When I had originally envisioned the room and created it a few years ago, I had wanted it to have a slanted ceiling, but that idea never came into fruition. Well, here it is now!

It looked just as I'd imagined it.

Above is an image of where the built-in bookcase will live, under the slanted ceiling.

I had wanted to put wallpaper on the new ceiling, but I realized it would then be a wall, and not a ceiling, so I decided to glue coffee stirrers to it instead so it would be more attic-like. According to the story I've made for the house, this room is part of the oldest wing of the house, built in the 16th century, but remodeled in the 1840s (and in case you are wondering, in the above photo, the roombox is turned upside down which is why it looks as though the ceiling is actually the floor).

I finished half of the ceiling and contemplated about what color paint I should use to paint it with. I settled on antique white, and after I painted a test piece of wood, I painted the whole ceiling with it.

It looked just how I had envisioned it!

For the ceiling lamp, as it is an old part of the house, I wanted to have a metal fixture that looked as though it had been painted over many times. I found a button and took off the top of it so it left a shiny, gold embellishment and painted it the same color of the ceiling. I hope to report to you soon with more exciting news (as this was a rather dull post, I'm afraid) about Marybelle's room with photos of the furniture I shall place in the room!

Contemplating A Layout

Hello everybody! I hope you are doing well. I hadn't really touched Marybelle's room since I removed the wallpaper almost a week ago, but today I worked out a rough layout of Marybelle's Room which I am excited to show you.

The bed, the bookcase, and the door are all stand-ins until I make the permanent ones.

I'm planning on building something exciting above the chest - I will reveal what in a later post!

This is the other side of the room. I'm planning on making another bed that's not pink, but the bedside table is permanent.

This is what the room looks like through the window. It looks a lot like a study, I think, from this view. I will replace the bookcase with one filled with (hopefully readable) miniature children's books from the 1920s (I may have forgotten to mention that this room is based off of children's rooms from the 1920s and 30s, even though the book I am using as inspiration for the room was published in 1945).

I am not certain on where I want to hinge the door. I can't decide if it should swing out towards the bedside table or the bookcase. If you have any suggestions, please let me know in the comments!

This image is at a bit of a slant so you can see the chest. It isn't quite finished as it doesn't have a bottom yet, and I am planning on adding little wheels to the bottom so it can roll around, but I'll have to see. The drawers don't open, unfortunately. I'm afraid this post was a bit picture-heavy, but hopefully I'll be back next week with more updates!

I've Gone And Done It Again. . .

That's right - I started a new room, even when I was so close to being done with the Trunk Room! The room that I started to renovate this time is the room I formerly called Becky's room. It was the first room I ever wallpapered way back when I began miniature making, and I always had a plan to redo it, but (perhaps out of fear) hadn't touched anything in it.

Unfortunately, the only photo of it I could find has terrible lighting, but it gives you a general idea. I have been making plans for a few weeks for what the room will be, and I thought I would share them with you. When I was around eight or nine, I was obsessed with the Famous Five series by Enid Blyton, and I was always imagining myself as one of the characters. My favorite of the Famous Five series was Five Go To Smuggler's Top, partly because of the description of the castle that the Famous Five was staying at. I used to imagine I'd have an enourmous dollhouse that was exactly like the castle in the book, so to satisfy these childhood dreams, I decided that I'd base this room after the castle in the Famous Five series. T he occupant of the room will be called Marybelle (who is one of the characters the Famous Five meets in the book), who is around ten years old. To start with the renovation, I pulled out all the wallpaper, leaving bare white walls. It was an easier job than I expected because I hadn't applied enough glue to the walls.

Now, for the 'before' images.

The East Wall (you'll have to excuse the pink tint to the photograph, my camera doesn't photograph white very well).

The South Wall (the red on the white walls is not because of the camera, but is just some red marker (?) that stained the roombox.

The North Wall.

The floor.

And lastly, the ceiling. I am very excited to see where this project takes me, and I hope you'll enjoy following along too!

The Trunk Room Nears Its Finishing Touches

I was commemorating the completion of the wooden floor in the Trunk Room by taking a lot of photos with dramatic lighting for my own amusement when I decided that instead of stalling, it was best to work on the door jamb.

The bottom of the door opening looked like this before I added the door jamb. Because the door opening was a bit higher than the floor, it would have to be part of a step I was planning on building soon.

I added the door jambs inside, and here is a photo of that (they are not glued in yet).

The doorway was very crooked and I didn't particulary want to sand it down, so I glued in the door jamb and just put pieces of wood underneath the pieces of the door jamb to straighten them.

In this image you can really see how painfully crooked the door jamb was before I straightened it.

After I had finished the door jamb and had added the door trim around it, I had to add the step. The above photo is what the door looked like without the step in place (I also like how you can see the dollhouse through the door opening).

I added a small piece of trim right above where the tiny step would be.

Above is the finished step. It is very small, for it is just meant to ensure you do not have to take a very large step down when entering the trunk room. Oh! And do you remember the gap between the wainscotting and the floorboards I was having trouble with in the post before?

Well, I finally fixed it!

And also, thank you for staying with me till the end of this long and most likely very boring posts (door jambs only go so far to stir up people's excitements, I know 😀).

In my next post I will be onto decorating the trunk room! Hooray! Thank you for reading!

Work Continues In The Trunk Room

As work has been progressing very slowly on Lockwood Manor, my goal for this month of February was to complete at least one room. Because I was almost finished with the Trunk Room, I decided it was a good place to start and laid the floor.

The floor before.

Nearly finished!

And done. Well, it looked fine - except for one thing.

There was a very small gap between the wainscotting and the floorboards. It was too small to make another floorboard to fit, so I had to brainstorm another solution. I could put a piece of grating in that corner, but I didn't have anything that small. I put that on hold for the moment to work on a door.

I drew a rough outline of the door, then cut it out.

It is too thin to be an actual door, so I will add some strip wood to the sides of it to make panelling, which should help some.

This is what the door looks like inside the Trunk Room.

While I have put the Trunk Room on hold for the time being until I figure out how to fix the floorboards, I have a few projects that I'm working on that I will post about soon, so stay tuned!

The view into the North Attic Bedroom from the door, which is what it would look like if Lockwood Manor was a real house (rather unrealistic head proportions, I know). Have a good weekend!

The Trouble With the Trunk Room

Hello! I'm sorry I haven't posted in a while, time just seems to slip away from me in these early winter months. I have however managed to get some work done in Lockwood Manor, including fixing up a room. You see, the Trunk Room in Lockwood Manor had originally had glass tiles glued to the bottom of the room box, which made the wallpaper, and the layer of thick orange cardstock beneath it (it was glued on about the same time as the glass tiles) bump out considerably.

Above are the glass tiles in question, along with the cardstock. My original plan was just to lift up the wallpaper a bit at the bottom, which would have been easy to do as it had never been glued down very well. Unfortunately, while it appeared that Plan A would work, the cardstock that was glued to the wall on the right hand side was thick enough that it was causing the wallpaper to bulge out, and would make the wainscotting that I was planning on gluing in pop out.

While it is not a very good image because such a thing is difficult to capture on camera, you can see the trunk room before I started to work on it. What follows next is a bit like one of those: "Why You Should Be Satisfied With Your First Version of the Room And Never Try To Fix The Things You Did Sloppily In It" stories, for everything that could go wrong seemed to.

On the left hand side of the room, you can see that on the bottom left, the tiles cause the wallpaper at the bottom to bulge out. The door has a rather large step down, but the wallpaper under the door frame at least shows you what is should be like without tiles.

After about an hour of work, I managed to take off the tiles at the bottom of the wall and rip off part of the wallpaper so I could glue on some wainscotting, which I thought would cover up all the mistakes at the bottom of the roombox. You can see the orange cardstock in the image, but I didn't want to rip it off in that corner because it was glued down flat and wasn't causing the wallpaper on top of it any problems. After this, images become sparse, for it was very difficult to take off any of the tiles, and was even more difficult to do so while holding a camera.

This image that looks like it was taken at midnight (I assure you that it was not), shows what the room (a corner of it, anyway) looked like after I ripped off most of the tiles. Well, hurray! All the tiles were gone, and I could start gluing in the wainscotting and completely forget all the troubles that I had had with the Trunk Room. Well. . . no.

I'm pretty certain that you cannot see it in this image, but the walpapery was glued in at a curve, with no wall behind it, and was so flimsy that if you accidentally knocked the wallpaper in that corner, it would break in half. It wasn't properly glued in at all, and to fix that, I had to tear it all off.

To address this issue, I had to rip off all of the wallpaper on the right hand side. At the left, you can see the start of my wainscotting. Then, to add interest to the otherwise rectangular room, I glued in a wall at a slight angle on the right.

Originally, I had wanted to glue just a tiny piece of wood at the corner, and then I wouldn't have to rip off all of the wallpaper, but the curve was still noticeable.

I stained the wainscotting, and began to glue it in.

Once I glued all of the wainscotting in, the floor decided to be a problem. I had put down flooring that was Peel-And-Stick, and it was coming up in place. Instead, I wanted a nice wooden floor. But, I'm afraid I've made this post too long already, so I will be back soon, hopefully with the Trunk Room finished (famous last words)! For now, stay well!

Snow (made out of paper) adorns the Servant's Entrance at the back of Lockwood Manor