Wishing you a happy & joyous Easter

Easter greetings to you all!  Whether you are a person of faith or not, Easter is a lovely time of year.  Apart from anything else, it is a great holiday.

For those of us who are Christians it is a wonderful reminder that life is not meaningless, that we don't pass on with nothing to look forward to.  We have the blessed hope of eternal life because we have a loving Saviour Who died for our sins and rose again.

I wish you and your family a wonderful time over this holiday, however you spend it.  I hope you have lots of sweet treats and of course lots of minis!

Shining some light on things

At least I hope it will.  Stupidly I didn't order a lighting strip when I ordered the lights so have no way of testing them, which is sooooo frustrating.

So here's how I've gone about lighting so far.  For the living room and the dining room, I drilled a hole in the ceiling in the centre of the room then scraped a shallow channel from the hole to the chimney on the floor surface above.

 The chimney has an opening that goes all the way down to the base, and I drilled a hole in the base for the wires to come through.

 I learned from trying to remove the wires from the plug on the first light that it was too fiddly so now I just cut the plug off.   This allows me to feed the wire through the small hole in the floor from the ceiling side.  The light has an adhesive spot on the top but I also add a little bit of glue around the edge.  As the wire is pulled through the hole, the light is positioned against the ceiling and the wire is held in place on the floor above with tape while the glue dries.

Once the glue dries I double over some tape so that I can use it to cover the wire in the channel and make it possible to remove the wire if necessary later on.

Then I feed the wire through the channel ready to send it down the chimney, holding it in place.

I cover it with the doubled tape 

....and put more tape over each side to hold it in place.

And finally I can put the rest of the flooring down knowing that hopefully I will be able to remove the light and wiring later if I have to for some reason.

Here is the light in the dining room - sorry it's so dark but it gives you a bit of an idea.

The kitchen is a bit different because there is no fireplace conveniently in there with a passage for the wires right down to the base of the house.  So here I will have to tackle hiding the wire by taking it down the inside of a small outside wall.  And I'll do the same for the bathroom.

In the hallway once again there was no simple route to hide the wires.  I had in the beginning meant to put a channel in the wall and cover it with wallpaper but forgot to do that in my eagerness to get over the mental holdup I seemed to have developed over sticking to one project.

The solution I came to was to put a channel in the second bedroom (nursery) wall, taking it to a corner near the skirting board.   Once again the channel isn't neat and tidy or glamorous by any means, but it does the job.  I simply gouged it out with the scalpel and a nail file - rather rough and ready but it doesn't have to be very deep or wide for these little wires.

  Here's the wire fed through the channel and held with a bit of tape at the lower end.  From here it will run along behind the skirting board, behind the fireplace, and go down the chimney.

You might have noticed that I've also done the flooring in these four rooms too. It is slow work doing them because you have to put them in in two pieces, and wait for them to dry before you can go on with anything else in that area.  I use paint cans and clamps and anything heavy I can find to hold them down while the glue takes.  It looks rather comical, especially when I have to pack lots of small tins of paint on because of the shape of the room.

I'm not altogether happy with the join between the second bedroom and the hallway.  In all the fittings the join was perfect.  When I glued it the join was perfect.  But somehow when I put the weights on it to dry I must have moved it a bit and now there's a gap between the bedroom and the hallway - so disappointing when I know it was right.  There's also a gap as a consequence on the right of the doorway inside the room.  Both will have to be fixed which is a bit annoying because they shouldn't be there.

Inspired by having the flooring done, and determined to make a big step forward, I then went on with the trim in the hallway - all three door frames, then the skirting boards.  This went really well.  Then I decided that because the windows are so difficult to install later on, I would take the risk to install now.  They are so pretty - I really like them.  In this photo I still have tape holding the windows in place and a peg holding the wire for the light in place, but you get an idea.

Even more inspired by having the hallway completed, I got a bit carried away and forgot that I hadn't varnished the floor in there.  I then went ahead and installed the first floor ceiling/second floor.  And here are a couple of  photos - although they just look a mass of clamps at this stage.

Today is Good Friday.  I obviously won't have the house constructed by Easter since Easter is already here. Maybe by the end of Monday it might be nearing it, but it won't be fully decorated because I'm waiting for wallpaper to arrive for the dining room, nursery and one of the attic rooms.  I'm also waiting for tiles.  But I'll be happy if the actual construction is well underway, ready to tackle the shingling next week.  That Sydney fair is getting very close now!

To colour or not to colour, that is the question....

Well, no comments at all about the verandah or the shingling on the bay window roof - hope that doesn't mean everyone hates the verandah tiling!

The shingling is now done on both the bay windows and their roofs, and on the verandah.  It looks so nice in its natural colour.

Here's the kitchen bay and the side verandah

And here is the front bay and the front verandah

The colour also goes really well with the colouring on the verandah tiles.  I had been thinking about staining or painting the shingles brown (which will also go well with the foundation and the verandah).  Now I am wondering.  Will I colour the shingles?  And If so, what colour will I do them?

I've adjusted the posts on each end of the verandah trim to accommodate the extra space taken up by the cladding on the house.  Otherwise the posts and railings wouldn't fit on the verandah at all.  Here they are just sitting in place - I don't want to glue them in yet until I have the light in place permanently and the trim and everything finished in that area, so I can access it easily.

Usually I don't shingle until the very last thing, because the shingles are too easily damaged as you move the house around to wallpaper so I hope I don't regret doing the windows now!  I really wanted to get an idea of what they would look like and it has certainly inspired me to get a move on with the rest of the house now.  I tend to get a bit stale when I've been doing one project for a while, and usually move on to something else.  This time I'm not going to start a new project so needed something to renew the energy.

So what do you think?  Colour nor not colour? And if I colour, then what colour?  Not the off-white, I plan to do that look on another house.  Some shade of brown?  Or leave natural?

Some 'hats' for the bays and verandah

......and other bits and pieces too.

It's been a while since I managed to get much done on the Fairfield, partly because I have been helping my son Nathan with his Toy Shop (I'll post about that soon on the Studio blog)  But on Friday, Saturday night and Sunday I got into things again.

It's amazing how much time those 'bits and pieces' take, isn't it?  But I have some progress to show you today anyway.  I've put the roofs on both the bay windows and also on the verandah now, but have only shingled one of the bay windows - boy, they're little but they sure do take ages to shingle, mainly because of the awkward angles.

The tower roof looked as though it would be really tricky to put together but it worked quite well.  In fact it wasn't as fiddly as the bay window roofs were to construct.  I took my time and allowed the glue to cure properly between each step, and also used blue painter's tape to hold it together while it dried.  It looked a bit like a blue mummy for a while but when I finally unwrapped it I was pleased with the result.

I'm sure that when I shingle it though it won't be a quick process with that shape :).

For the front steps I used vinyl bricks for the risers.  Using Weldbond glue held it on really well - other glues I tried first weren't successful at all.  They still need a bit of weathering.  I'm planning on using the same for the foundation (probably) too.  You can see the steps in the photo below of the porch.

Making a paper template for the front porch made it easier to piece together the tile paper so that I could make the best use of the border tile pattern before I glue it to the porch.  I'm using Brodnax Halfscale Victorian tiles HVT307,  because it reminds me a bit of the tiles on the verandah of the family home in which I grew up.

I changed my mind about putting the sconce light in the foyer, and decided to use it on the front porch.  I don't know whether it is really suitable for an exterior light but I think it looks quite nice.  I don't have it permanently in place yet but will run the wires down the crack in the

The hallway on the first floor is now all wallpapered, and I've put flooring down there as well.  To do this I made a paper template, first putting a strip down the length of the hallway then adding pieces to fill in the other shapes, sticking them on with tape until I had the outline of the hallway.  I traced this onto the wooden flooring sheets and put them down in sections, running a line of yellow wood glue around the edge with a few dabs of tacky glue in the middle of each edge for instant grip.  To help them dry flat I placed paint tins on the pieces for a few hours.

The first and second bedrooms also have their paper templates made but I can't put the flooring down there until the lights are installed on the ground floor, because the wires for those lights will run across the floor under the boards.   Even though the templates look messy with all the tape they give a good outline of the shape of the room if they are done carefully.  Don't know why I've written Bedroom 2 on the main bedroom - I've looked at it 100 times in reality and only noticed that in the photo!

On the ground floor I have cut out the flooring and started to glue it in place.  This floor was more fiddly to do - I wish I had decided to do it before I put the first floor in place but at that stage the plan was to hide the wires for the lighting under a false ceiling instead of under the the floor above.  Never mind.

So there you are.  Progress.  I have the porch ready to put in too, but glue was drying when I was taking the photos and I didn't want to disturb things.  

To finish I want to show you a photo of the front again, with some beautiful half-scale lavenders that I bought from Marianne who has an Etsy shop here 

Off on a tangent

The other day I made a list of the little fiddly things I need to do before I can really go on with the next stage.  Then I made a list of what needs to be done on the inside after I do those fiddly little things and before I go on with the next stage.  It took up a whole A4 page!  So what did I do?  For three days I did - absolutely none of those fiddly little things :-o I painted another coat on the trim, I sat and looked at the house and thought.  I dry fitted the second floor and it split open the join between the front wall and the side wall in the process so I sanded the edges until it now fits better.

And then last night, after 2 nights of only 4 hours' sleep  - no, not because of the Fairfield :) and a day when I was so tired I couldn't be bothered doing anything, I got my second wind and tackled, not any of those important things, but shingling the lower part of the bay window instead!  Typical of how tired I was, I thought I was doing the kitchen bay, which would not be so obvious if I made mistakes (which of course I did since I was experimenting) but this morning I see that it is blatently obvious that in fact I did the front bay.

I have since replaced that narrow wood trim at the top with one single piece.  It looks much better without a join in the wood.

The fact that it is narrower at the top than the bottom wasn't by design.  It happened because I clamped the narrow wood corner trim at the top to make it join evenly with the light ivory trim.  The result was this shape.  I really like it.  At first I had the painted corner  trim all the way down but I prefer the wooden trim. It doesn't  overpower the shingles like the wider painted one does.

The plan was that I would paint the shingles in the light ivory to match the rest of the trim but I like the wood.  I think I'll leave the decision about the colour until I've shingled the rest of the house and decide then.  I wish I had one of those programs where you can put your own house into the computer and try out the effect of different colour schemes - wouldn't that be great for our dollhouses?

I was so pleased with the effect of the trim on the door and on the sides of the bay window I thought that I'd put some more on, just temporarily, to get a feel of the effect and perhaps gain some more inspiration.  Here is what it looked like:

As you can see, nothing is fixed permanently.  And I haven't cut the corner trims on the sides of the house so they are sticking up like some sort of weird aerials.  You probably can't see them but I've put the front and kitchen doors together.  I really like the design on the front door window, but I wish I had cut the plastic and separated the pieces so that the lines are centred nicely in the open panels of the door.

I've done the window sills in a much darker green but they don't look a lot darker now - you can see them if you click on the picture to enlarge it.

So now I feel much more enthusiastic again and hope to get lots of sleep over the weekend so I can tackle those pesky fiddly details with renewed determination on Sunday.

Welcome Sharon, Conny and Adriana

'Village Toys' - Town Square series

It's great to see the number of followers growing even if it is slowly.  Thank you to Sharon, Conny and Adriana for joining us here.

Sharon does the most wonderful work in the area of blog design (www.plumroselane.com).  I use her backgrounds for most if not all of my blogs, and as you might notice I have just purchased the personalized banner and signature for this blog too.  She is wonderful to do business with, so helpful and patient.  I love her backgrounds and am tempted to open more blogs just to use them lol!  Or maybe keep changing the backgrounds on the existing blogs would be more realistic.  So be warned Sharon, I'll be back for some banners and signatures to match some of your 'just backgrounds' lol!  Not only that but Sharon understands our passion and fascination for miniatures so that makes her pretty special as well.

Interior of 'Village Toys'

Conny is renovating a large Van Buren dollhouse and doing a very thorough job of it too.  She found it neglected and needing a home and has made many improvements to it.  She is also the author of a children's book 'One Eyed Jack', about a fish who is a modern day Sherlock Holmes.  If you visit her blog http://www.itsaminilife.blogspot.com.au you will see some great ideas for getting light into a dollshouse. You'll also find the link for buying her book if you look under the label 'My Books'.

Adriana (http://wwwminisdadrica.blogspot.br) builds the most gorgeous furniture in halfscale.  She doesn't put much text on her blog, which is a pity, but the pictures tell the story.  And there is a video showing her carving a cabriole leg from scratch in just 3 minutes or so.  Adriana is a very talented lady indeed!  Her furniture is of an excellent standard, beautifully finished.  I particularly love the chair in the latest post - it is so delicate and well balanced.  So often half scale furniture can look 'clumpy' but all of Adriana's furniture is perfectly proportioned.  


I do hope you all take time to have a look through some of this blog and that you enjoy visiting here as much as I enjoy visiting your blogs!  Please do come again and share my journey with this Fairfield.  And encourage me as I endeavour to finish it before the May fair here in Sydney.  In fact I want to finish it before Easter!  So that's even more of a challenge, isn't it?  And at the moment I'm fuzzling around not getting anywhere, so I'd appreciate a good kick or some encouragement - whichever :)

'It's not easy being green'

I've nicknamed the house 'Kermit' because it is oh so green at the moment!  To soothe my concerns I painted a pile of the corner trim pieces in the Delta Light Ivory that I'm using for the trim and tried them against the house and it relieves it a lot.  And of course there'll be the window and door trims in the same colour, as well as the porch trim.

In the photo below you might be able to see that I've installed the interior frame for the front door.

Front view

Side view showing the kitchen bay window and the tower

The big difference you will notice now is that the tower is in place.   This was an interesting procedure, but then I don't seem to ever do things the easy way lol!.  I wanted to have skirting board and cornice in there because you can see it from the living room.  I know, I know - too fussy by half!  But that's me.  Probably no-one will ever see it but I'll know it's there.

First I cut the cornice and skirting board pieces, using the slots through which the tower would go as a guide.  Then I slid the tower into place and glued it, then adjusted the skirting board until it fitted well and glued it  in place.  You can just see it through the doorway in the photo below.

I also installed a light in the foyer but removed it because there was a bit of a disaster with the wallpaper when I was putting it through the slot even though it was really careful.  Now I'm going to have to fix it up or re-paper the wall.  I left the exterior wall of the tower without cladding so I could take the wire of the light down behind it yesterday but guess what? Tonight I forgot and went ahead and put the cladding over it anyway :)

I've only put cladding on the tower as far as the first floor, because  I've run out of cladding.  I've ordered more but before I clad the second floor of the tower I want to think about some changes I might be making to the second floor and I can't decide definitely about those until I fit the floor and the roof.

Peter has also been working on and off to reinforce underneath the ground floor/foundation of the house for me.  Here's a view of the underneath now.

He was unable to get the correct depth of stripwood in pine so bought some lovely Tasmanian Oak!  It's ironic that the best quality timber in the whole building is where it won't even be seen by most people.  The house feels heaps more stable now that he's done this, and I'm happier about it taking pressure.

Now when the glue has dried thoroughly on the latest bits of cladding I will give it a couple more coats of paint.  I painted a sample piece of cladding with 3 coats and Peter took it today to Bunnings, a chain of huge hardware stores here in Australia.  One of the people in the paint department colour-matched the sample by computer to make up a small quarter litre tin of paint for me.  He said he had trouble matching it exactly because of the ridges in the cladding but when I painted  a bit on the cladding piece it was an exact match.  I'm really pleased with it.  Being a house paint with a satin finish it has more depth than a craft paint and it does look really nice on the wall I tried it out on as well.  Of course it all needs painting properly yet.

I'm looking forward now to getting the window trims on and seeing the effect of those in place but first I need to finish the wallpapering.  I can do the main bedroom but I'm waiting for wallpaper for the other bedroom on the first floor and for the dining room.  And I'm having trouble finding the carpet I want to put through the house.  I might have to settle for cream, which isn't very practical for a family with four children!

There aren't very many comments coming in so I'm guessing that you all hate the green.  I hope you like it better as the other elements are added.

Over the 'decorator block' I think

I've been  fiddling for several days with the staircase.  I wanted to have what looked a little like a newel post at the bottom of the stairs, and it took a fair bit of experimentation to do it.  I'm not really happy with the result but it will have to do.  I added balsa on the stair side of the last railing, some scrap ply to the outside and smoothed it with woodfiller.  They're not nicely carved ones, just plain but I think they have more substance than the thin pieces that were there before.  Here it is in progress before I finished it off

 Once it was properly dry I sanded and shaped them a bit more, then gave them several coats of paint and one of satin varnish.  They still need to be topped off with squares on the top of the posts.

The first floor landing received the same treatment before the railing was added.

  I kept losing interest and drifting off to do other things, including painting, 'aging' and varnishing the kitchen hutch (oops! the drawer has come out and I didn't notice when I took the photo)

making a 9-drawer cupboard (yes, it counts because it's for the Fairfield somewhere) though it's not painted yet because I'm not sure what colour to do it;

making a trim piece for the foyer side of the archway to the living room which has since snapped so I have to re-make it;  and just perusing other Fairfield blogs.  But mainly cladding walls. So here they are so far,  first the living room bay window wall (bit of a mis-measurement on the front of the bay window - fortunately this will be covered by the corner trim):

 Then the kitchen bay window wall.  this photo shows that I've done part of the porch wall but I don't want to do any more of that wall until the tower goes in.

 And the rear, dining room wall.

They all need another coat or two of paint of course.  And you'll have noticed that the bay windows are not clad on the lower half.  You'll see why later on.

And finally I've been fiddling with the area under the stairs. In the original Fairfield this is supposed to be another built-in bookcase but I want it to be a pantry.  After lots of cutting, fitting and teeth-grinding I've set the piece that is supposed to support the back of the staircase further back into the area.  I will close in the top part of the area and put shelves in the cavity for the pantry.  Then I'll add a door that (hopefully) will open to display lots of goodies.

It sure doesn't look much for all the work it took to get this far :)  But it's a good spot for the pantry and it will be easy to display things in there.

And I've repainted the kitchen - now it's cream again!  The green just wasn't the right green - lightening it changed it too much even though it's the same green as that used on the exterior.  I have an idea for the flooring and will try it out on Monday.

So that's it up to now.  What do you think?

Why oh why didn't I remember?

I was able to get on with wallpapering the other day.  I have carried the Brodnax HFL 131 through the ground floor hallway, the entrance, and the living room as well as the 1st floor hallway right side wall.

1st floor hallway side wall

Now when I was doing the staircase side wall I knew full well that I needed to wallpaper the inside of the wall before I glued it in place.  So why oh why didn't I remember to do that?!!!  I've had to pull out the staircase and do it with the wall in  place and of course that was very fiddly to do.  Plus it was impossible to do the wraparound from the hallway to the staircase without a join, whereas I could have done it better if I had remembered and cut the stair paper and the entrance wall paper in one piece.

The fireplace interiors are done with a grey wash for the grouting, then dabbed with a brown mixture for the bricks and finally 'dirtied up' with some black from the 'soot'.  Grace Shaw of Virtual Dollhouse has been her usual wonderful, helpful self and sourced some fireplace surrounds for me.  I wasn't happy with just the openings as they are and the mantlepiece looks cumbersome if I put both the support and the top pieces together as they are supposed to be.  I could have just used a simple frame around the openings I guess, and the top piece of the mantlepiece, but these are really nice.  I saw them on Emily Morganit's Fairfield site that I mentioned before, which can be found here .

The lights I ordered from Molly's House Miniatures  have arrived.  The three-globe ones are for the living and dining rooms; the standard lamp is also for the living room (probably); there are 2 of the wall sconces: one for the entry and one for the first floor hallway; and 4 ceiling lights, two for the 1st floor bedrooms, one for the kitchen and one for the bathroom.  I have them stacked on each other in the photo below to make it easier to fit them all in.

I've also been thinking a lot about the cladding on the exterior.  I had forgotten to trace around the front right wall before I glued it on, so I removed it and traced around it and the kitchen bay window on to the cladding pieces.  I got both of them out of one piece of cladding, which was good.  I've started gluing the cladding to the exterior, but I'm taking it slowly, filling in bits of time when I'm waiting for things to dry or whatever.  One advantage of doing it this way is that I can clamp each piece down and make sure that it doesn't warp or move while it is drying.  Probably too cautious but I don't want to take too much time at the moment to just concentrate on the cladding.  Here's the right front done.  It needs to have the slots filled in (I should have realized that they don't need to be cut out at all), and it needs another coat of paint but I'll give it all a couple of finishing coats at the end.

I've managed to get glue from the staircase onto bits of the wallpaper in the living room and other bits - it must have been on my fingers.  So I'm not happy at all.  That's the end of the wallpapering for now, I've decided - if I can wallpaper quarter scale once it's constructed then I can surely do half inch scale!! Except for the tower of course, that had to be done before I can put it in because it won't be accessible once it's in.

So now it's  back to finishing off the foyer so the tower can go in.