Fixing Things Up For Christmas

I've got some cheerful music playing in the background, a few snow flurries are falling from the sky, the fireplace is lit, and I thought it was about time to fix a few things up around the dollhouse so it could at least look slightly more presentable for the holidays.

Because of all the gusty winds we've been having at Lockwood Manor, a slate tile fell off of the roof. As that is the side of the dollhouse you first see, I had to fix it first.

Much better! Next came the subject of redoing the ceiling in the servant's room, which I had rather sloppily painted a year ago as a temporary fix.

I started to add wood panelling to the ceiling. I was worried that for some reason it would end up looking like a floor on a ceiling, so I decided to lay the pieces of wood vertically instead of horizontally.

The work progressed quickly, even though it was rather tedious, and pretty soon I finished it.

I still need to add trim on the sides of the boxes (you can see that I've layed the trim for the bottom), but I have to wait until I've finished the attic room above it. If anybody has any ideas of what the attic room could be, I'd love if you could write it into the comments.

I also added little clothes into the drawers!

For some reason I really like this image. By the way, the poster for 'Jazz Wear' came from a sticker book about 1920s fashion. I figured it was appropriate for Lockwood Manor, so I hung it up.

Next, I endlessly glued down planks of wood to make the floor in the North Attic Bedroom. It was enjoyable once I got into the flow of it. I'm not sure if you can see, but the nail dots that I've added to the boards are made with a pencil tip.

I made a door for the attic, and installed it. Although it took me a few times to get the hinges right, I finally was able to and the door actually swings!

I also installed trim in Anthea's Room. The roomboxes aren't really finished in my opinion until you add trim to hide the messy edges.

Thus concludes fixing up the dollhouse for Christmas! Happy holidays, everybody!

Mr. Messenger's Study and His Swivel Chair

I have began to work on a new room, based off one of my favorite books as a very young child, Annabel's House, by Norman Messenger. It is a book with drawings of an Edwardian house with lots of flaps that you can pull to reveal things inside the cupboards, etc. One of my favorite rooms in the book is most likely the study, and I am basing a room in my dollhouse after it. I am a visual person, so I wrote on scraps of papers and arranged them around the room until I found an arrangment I liked.

The room posing as the study is actually going to be the kitchen, and the study will probably be either on the third or fourth floor. I got to work making the swivel chair for the desk. It's a bit tippy, but it stands upright in the kitchen. I had to prop it up in Anthea's Room - I think her floor might be a bit uneven in places. It's an old house, after all! I don't quite know what I based the chair after - I did hunt for a bit of inspiration on Google, searching for '1930s swivel desk chairs', and based it a bit off of those. While it doesn't swivel, I'm still happy with it.

My New Obsession - Bring on the Parquet!

I'm afraid that a new obsession has overtaken me. I've grown insane about parquet flooring after finding out how fun the parquet flooring in George's Room was. That is, making parquet flooring. Which is actually quite lucky for me, because a lot of rooms in my dollhouse need it. I've currently been re-flooring Anthea's room. It's a bit fiddly, but I find it relaxing - I play piano, so my fingers are used to moving at quirky angles and moving quickly which is a must when you're about to drop that little piece of flooring your fingers are holding!

Before I started re-flooring, the floor in Anthea's Room looked like this. Because this was a box I refurbished way back then, and the previous owner had kept crayons and markers in it, it was a bit mucky. I tried to wash off the markers that had stained the box - yes I quite literally gave the box a bath - but they didn't come off. I sanded it some, and you can't really tell in photographs, but in real-life, it's glaringly obvious, so I covered it with a green velvet carpet and pretended it wasn't there.

That was fine until yesterday, when I had had enough and decided to redo it. After all, I've been going through a phase of "Finish All of the Rooms Before Getting Started On New Ones But Still Continue Planning", so I thought it best to get started on Anthea's room. I'm not sure if you can see it, but at the bottom left corner, there are two toothpicks that way back in yester year I had glued as base boards. Yuck! So I had to take them off, but the glue had stuck rather hard. . .

So, when I yanked it off with tweezers (or rather, gently pulled until it gave away), it left me with a big rip in the wallpaper. And it wasn't exactly the kind of rip that one could ignore, either. Luckily, the wallpaper (although still glued to the baseboard), was fully intact, so I was able to glue it back on.

It looks much better, if I may say so myself! (The gap between the bottom of the wallpaper and the floor will be covered up by baseboards.)

Even though I had no idea what type of parquet I wanted, I glued in the trim pieces on the walls. Then I encoutered a slight problem.

The gold foil that was the separation from the wooden floor and the hearth had a small indent in it, which caused a gap in between the floor and the foil, where you could see the sub-floor beneath. The floor was dark, the foil was gold, and the sub-floor was light, so it was a noticeable gap. I covered it with stain and even though some got on the gold foil, it wiped off easily.

But. . . the piece of wood I cut for it had a larger grain, which made it darker colored than the rest of the wood. You can see the comparison above. The wood I cut for the fireplace is on the left, the glued-in trim is on the right. I solved this by sanding the wood on one side, which reduced the grain sized, and the stain didn't take it as harshly.

Then, I had all the trim glued in, and had to decide what to do for the inside. I thought about doing little Mosiac parquet (if you look it up on Google, you'll get an image), but I didn't want to deal with all of the fiddly bits near the fireplace. I considered herringbone, but I've read you need to use a graph drawn on the floor for this, and I thought it would work better in a room that didn't have the wallpaper glued in yet. Then I thought about dividing the floor into four different sections like I saw somebody do on a dollhouse website (cider12.com).

I liked the idea, and for the inside, I thought I would do diagonal boards, like in the image below.

The first one I glued in. It was a bit nerve-wracking, I'll admit!

Square one completed!

Square two completed!

A closeup. Perhaps if it wasn't a children's bedroom, I would have expanded the trim to three sections, and had the middle one a mahogany for a highlight, and had the four quadrants also become three sections, the middle one also maghoany. But it was a children's room, and I'm a bit of a newcomer to this land of parquet, so I stuck with the simpler version. However, I'll surely find a room to do a very extravagant parquet on!

Square three completed!

Square four completed!

Making the parquet floor is very rewarding because you can see your progress immediately, and I'm insanely proud of this one.

More parquet floors coming my way? Of course! I'm toying with the idea of redoing every single floor in the Mansion that I used stick-on-flooring for. (Ignore the dust in this image, I have since sweeped it off with a dollhouse broom!)

As a reminder, the trim before I glued in the rest of the parquet.

And the finished parquet!

I hope you enjoyed!

The Philadelphia Story (in my dollhouse!)

One of my favorite movies is The Philadelphia Story, from 1940, with Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart and Ruth Hussey. It's a wonderful movie - very well acted, good plot, etc. Also - the house in the movie is fabulous! I drew some inspiration from it - the grand rooms, for instance! I highly recommend that you watch it - you'll love it! Now, about the dollhouse: If, let's say, you were only two or three inches high and could fit inside my dollhouse, you'd walk through the nonexistent-front door, and enter the hallway. It's enourmous - and unfinished. But let's imagine. The walls are strung with paintings, a rich red wallpaper, and an enourmous archway at the end of the room, leading into another beautiful room behind. On one side of the hallway is a door in the middle of two enourmous green and black marble columns - very grand. Opening that door would lead to the enourmous ballroom, with the intricate parquet adorning the floor. Oh, how I wish! But it might take a few more years to get to that point :-) So far none of the grand rooms are completed (or even started - except for the Music Room), as I'm summoning the courage to do it. Please come, courage! Back to The Philadelphia Story. In my dollhouse, I have a miniature poster of it, in Anthea's Room.

I wish I had an original in my house, too. . . As Robert Young used to say on Good News of 1939,

"Go to the movies, and take the family with you!"

Goodbye for now!