Progress pic with the painted roof & porches. Need to work on the railings.

My picture didn't turn out too clear on this one. New dining set and billiard table.

Finally, some progress pictures...

Chimney, unfinished

The difference between the new brick and old

 I mentioned that I had run out of brick paper for the fireplaces in the Fairfield. The picture on the left is of the fireplaces and the last bit of unfinished chimney.

When I reprinted the brick paper, it came out quite a bit lighter than what I had used before. You can kind of see the difference in the picture on the left (the chimney on top is the new paper, the fireplace below is the old). I think the stuff I used before may have been printed on my other printer that I had to replace when it died. Anyway, I decided to just redo all of the brick so it would match. I still need to redo the insides of the fireplaces and the hearths, but here's how it looks right now. I think I actually like the lighter brick better anyway, so I guess it all worked out.

New brick paper

Extending the tower walls

Since I wanted to open up the third floor tower room, I had to add some wood pieces on to the tower walls to make them match up with the roof on that side of the house. Here's the extensions installed. I need to add another piece of siding and paper the inside of the tower room still.

Bathroom, billiard table, dog & cat.

Also, I just received some halfscale furniture and animals that I had ordered for the house. Here's the 'eyecandy'...

 I love the itty bitty little dog and cat. I don't have any people for the dollhouse yet, but I have animals.

Look how tiny!

Now if I could just get the house finished enough for them to move in. :)

Waiting for the glue to dry...

I have been working on the Fairfield the past couple of weeks, a little bit at a time. Nothing really worth taking photos of at the moment though. I got the attic walls papered and the round windows painted and installed.  Hubby helped me cut the hole in the roof and pieces to extend the walls of the tower room. We're getting those glued into place today, then I can wallpaper the inside of those walls, do the siding on the outside, and get the windows installed. We'll also get the front tower wall glued into place hopefully today, then we'll be able to work on the 2nd story balcony.  I ordered the railings for the balcony last week and they were delivered on Friday. I still need to figure out what to do about the chimney than runs through the attic space before I can glue the roofs into place. There's still a lot to be done but at least it feels like I'm making a little bit of progress.

Slow going on the Fairfield

No pictures to share, but it's been a while since I posted so I thought I'd give a quick update. I have the roof pieces painted and ready to install now, as soon as I cut an opening for the tower room. The dining room floor has been glued in. The warped wall is now glued on and clamped and hopefully it will stay in place. One staircase is installed, but I still need to do the railings. I also need to figure out what to do about the top part of the chimney. I thought I had enough of the brick paper I used on the fireplaces, but found that I don't have enough to cover the whole thing. And when I print out more it doesn't match exactly. I wish I'd done the whole thing at the same time so I could make sure everything matched (there's my TIP for the day... if you're using printable wallpaper / brickwork, make sure you have enough for the entire project). Some of the things on my to-do list to finish the house include the following:

• "brick" the chimney in the attic
• install the 2nd staircase and all the railing
• cut opening for tower room
• install small windows on the tower and circular windows on the other walls
• figure out how to finish the 'foundation' that shows at the bottom of the house
• tower roof
• porch and 2nd story balcony
• mantels for the fireplaces

I really like the look of this house but it's been a bit of a pain to put together. The wood is hard to work with and it hasn't all fit together correctly. Plus I made things harder on myself by deciding to 'bash' the kit in several ways. It would be easier as well if I had a dedicated workspace for assembling it. Right now it's on a little table in my front room so it's kind of in the way and I don't have a lot of room to spread things out. Luckily my kids are old enough now that they pretty much leave things alone when I tell them to.

 Anyway, there's my random rambling for today. Hopefully I'll have more progress to report next time. :)

Dry-fitting the roof

I hit a snag on the stairs and won't be able to finish them the way I'd like until I can get some more supplies. But I wanted to keep working on the dollhouse, so I did a dry-fit of the roofs. What I discovered is that one of my walls is pretty badly warped, and several of the tab-and-slots didn't fit together very well. We trimmed things down and got most of the pieces together okay. The warped wall will need to be strongly clamped when we glue it on, but I think it will turn out alright.





Part of the reason I wanted to fit the roofs was to get a better idea of how it all goes together so I can decide whether to make some changes to the tower & roof. There's a little room at the top of the tower that is closed off from the rest of the attic if you build the kit according to plan, and I think that's just silly. I think we're going to cut a hole in one side of the roof to make that room accessible so we'll need to make some changes to the tower walls too.






It's starting to look a little more like a house now, but there's still so much left to do...

Staircases

The staircases are assembled, thanks to some help from my hubby. The shorter staircase goes on the 2nd floor, where the ceilings aren't as high. Now we just need to put them in the dollhouse and add the posts at the top and bottom of the railing.

Oh, and I mentioned before that I was trying to decide about the interior trim on the kitchen and bathroom windows. I decided to put the trim on so that all of the windows will be the same.

So I'm making some progress, just not very quickly.

Stairs

Last night I spent a lot of time painting the spindles for my stair rails and I think I figured out part of the reason I never seem to finish any of the dollhouse kits I've worked on. I really don't like painting. It's not that it's a really awful task, or that I hate it with a passion or anything. It's just so tedious! Especially on tiny little things on 1/24" scale stair rails, or fiddly little window frames. Maybe that's why most of my dollhouses have wallpapered interiors.

At any rate, the first coat of paint is on now. I think I'll need to sand them down and do another coat (bleh!) to make it look more smooth and finished looking. Then I just need to fit the staircases into place and I can move onto the next task. I'm so looking forward to finishing this house!

Window trim dilemma

I'm having a little (ha ha, pun intended) dilemma about the window trim on this dollhouse.

So, here are some of the windows I had installed previously in the Fairfield. The blue room will probably be a bedroom and the pink room is the front room. I used the interior trim that came with the windows on these ones.

The green room is the kitchen. I haven't put the interior trim on these ones yet. What I'm trying to decide is if I should put the trim on or not, since I used the trim on the other windows. I think they look okay without it but I don't know if it would look funny to have some windows with the trim and some without. This room is on the other side of the house, so when you're looking from this side you can't really see the other rooms anyway. My husband suggested leaving the trim off of these ones because he says kitchen windows don't usually have the larger fancy trim around them anyways. On the other hand, the trim does give a more finished formal look.
Whatever I do on these windows I will also do on the bathroom window in the room above this one.

Any opinions?

Windows & doors

Today I worked on windows and doors for the Fairfield. It was a tedious and sometimes aggravating job. After painting the interior doors I discovered that 2 of the 3 doors would not fit in the openings and had to be pared down bit by bit until I could get them in. I cracked the trim on both of them trying to get them into place. I also ended up with some weird gaps between the door frames and the trim.

If I were to ever put this kit together again, I think I would try to install the windows and doors and their trim before putting the walls together. The windows have been easy enough to pop into place, but the trim on the inside is a bit fiddly to install. The doors have been the worst though. I got so frustrated with those today I was tempted to pack the whole house back into storage again.

I would also consider lighting the house if I were to build it again. I've been doing some research on other Fairfields and have found some really cute ones that have been electrified. When I started mine, I was really intimidated at the thought of wiring in 1/24" scale. Now I don't think it would be so bad.

I think my next project will be the stairs. I opted to buy Houseworks staircases rather than using the ones that came with the kit. I've started the painting & staining so they just need to be assembled and put into place.  Once they are installed I'll be able to glue in the front wall of the tower, then I can move on to the balcony and the third floor, and trim for the whole house.

2nd floor hallway with new wallpaper & doors installed

Bedroom door installed - I still need to make a mantle for the fireplace

Fairfield, exterior photos

Here's a view of the front door and the extended front porch. I haven't decided what color to make the porch yet. I have a wood veneer covering it because the extension didn't connect very smoothly and I thought it would be easier to make it look nice this way.

Here's a view of the second story balcony that I'm adding onto the house.The extended porch & balcony are the biggest changes I made to the kit. I also changed the top windows on the tower. They'll look like the other windows, only half the height. Since we're covering the porch with another piece of wood we used it for testing paint & stain colors.

I had planned to glue the windows in place tonight, but I can't find my glue so that'll have to wait I guess.

More inspiration for the Fairfield

So, I've found some more inspiration for building the 1/24" scale Fairfield dollhouse kit on this blog: Jenn's Minis - particularly this picture:

I really like the way she's opened up the areas by the stairs, and the open, airy feeling she's achieved here. As a result, I've cut about 1 1/4 inches off one of the walls on my house (the green room will probably be the kitchen, unless I decide to rearrange the whole house again). I like her color scheme as well, but I have no desire to try re-papering my house again now that it's as put together as it is.

 I like the open 2nd floor as well, but that would leave me without a place to put a bathroom (unless I put it in the attic). I'm still debating about that.

I've decided to rip out the wallpaper in the 2nd floor hallway and replace it with a different color. You can see where I've pulled off the paper on the left side. The right side is stuck more firmly so it's going to take a little more work to remove. The blue room is the one I'm planning to make into a bathroom (for now at least).

Here's a view of the exterior and the first of the windows installed:

I still need to put up the tower walls and work on the porches.

Here's a shot of the other rooms (the right wall still needs to be glued on):

Well, enough rambling for now. More to follow (hopefully). :)

Getting back to miniatures

It seems like everyone has a blog nowadays so I decided I'd give it a try too. I have a ton of miniature UFOs (UnFinished Objects) that I'd really like to finish someday. I thought if I was writing about the miniature projects I want to work on it might help me actually make some progress on them. So here goes...

Several years ago I started working on a 1/24" scale Greenleaf dollhouse kit called the Fairfield. I drew a lot of inspiration from Emily Morganti's dollhouses and from this Fairfield picture from an old Nutshell News that she had on her site.

I really like the balcony on this one and I plan to expand my dollhouse's balcony also. I had my kit largely assembled but ran into some problems and ended up packing it away for a long time. Earlier this week I pulled it out again and got back to work on it. There's still quite a bit left to do. I just need to decide what to tackle next. I'll try to get some 'in progress' pictures taken and posted.

In the meantime, here are some pictures of my previous miniature creations on Webshots.