Slightly less scary 😉

image from Clipart Library

I got out the Sonicrafter to make an actual hole this time, rather than simply trimming off edges.  Now to be honest I really don't know what the various blades are called, but when I trimmed the edges of the upper house base I used a semi-circular one to work my way across in a straight line.  This time I used a rectangular one with the teeth just at one end to make plunge cuts.  There ~ now you know as much as me, in fact I'm pretty sure it's highly likely that you know a helluva lot more than me 😄

I didn't take these photos at a very good angle, so you may have to tilt your head a wee bit ~ sorry about that 😏  Anyhoo, this is what will be the third floor of the completed house and is in effect Lady Constance's floor.  Her bedroom is beyond the wall and I'm taking the photo from what will eventually be her bathroom.

As I mentioned previously the floors below had two doorways so that folk could get from one staircase to the other, but since there was no access up to the attic this floor simply had the doors to the rear of the house.  This does not fit in with my plans so I needed to cut out a doorway at the front ~ the door at the rear will be blocked in later.  I took my time with the measuring ~ you know, all that "measure twice, cut once" malarky 😉  You may be able to see that the original doorways are a little taller than what is needed for the doors I purchased (from Bromley Craft Products if you're interested, who seem to have become my first port of call when I'm looking for stuff!), so there will have to be a little filling-in along the top of the other doorways.

Since I was cutting out a new hole here I was able to make it to the correct dimensions.  I must admit that I found making this doorway a wee bit harder than the trimming I did the other day, but since it's only the second time that I've ever used anything even remotely like the Sonicrafter I'm still pleased with my efforts 😊

Thank goodness, though, for architrave!

Next step is working out how to configure those pesky staircases 😕

Just in case you're interested...

image from Clipart Library

 today is our wedding anniversary ~ 39 years and never a cross word.....and if you believe that, then you'll believe anything 😆

Little words of wisdom

 

A tad scary 😟

image from Clipart Library

I admit that I've been procrastinating but I finally pulled up my big girl panties and used my anniversary gift from Adrian ~ the oscillating multi tool.  I've been putting it off because using power tools is all very new to me and to be honest I was feeling a tad scared 😮  But needs must as I really wanted to get the base of the upper house trimmed.  It's only a few centimetres bigger all round than the top of the basement so I wanted to bring it as close as possible to those dimensions.  

The first job was to trim off the front edge which as you can see in the photo above extends beyond the front of the house, either side of where the original entrance door was positioned.  As luck would have it, simply trimming in a straight line brought the whole of that edge level, and doesn't affect the opening front panels.  The upper house now sits level with the top of the basement.  The top of the basement overhung its own walls in any event and I'm still undecided whether I like how that looks or not.  If I decide it doesn't look quite right I will just add some simple moulding all round to soften the transition.

I was quite nervous when I began cutting but I took it very slowly, starting with the lowest power level. 

After I had trimmed the left-hand side, I felt a little more confident to move up to power level number 2 😄  The base of the upper house now sits level with the top of the basement at the front.  It does still extend a couple of centimetres or so at the back but I've decided to leave that be.  I think I may well be able to absorb that overhang with the plans I have in mind for the whole of the back of the house.

The upper house base also extends about a centimetre either side of the basement top so I decided to be brave and trim the side edges, too 😧

Once again luck was on my side as it just so happened that the side walls of the upper house fit in grooves on the base.  Trimming off a centimetre from the very edge doesn't affect the sides from still sitting in the grooves, although I shall have to glue them in very securely when I rebuild the house.

I clamped the base to my bench to do all the cutting and was able to keep it held pretty firmly.  I know I haven't done a perfect job by any means, but I am still happy with the end result.  Ultimately the whole of the house will be "clad" with textured wallpaper to represent harling (roughcast render), similar to how our real-life house is finished, which will hopefully cover up a multitude of sins 😉 

I've been very sensible, by the way, and have equipped myself with appropriate dust masks.  They are probably the most uncomfortable masks I've ever worn but better safe than sorry, eh?  Dust from MDF is horrible stuff and I definitely don't want to be breathing it in ~ I also vacuumed as soon as I'd trimmed each edge before moving on to the next section.  I look quite a fright, I know 😏

I had a rummage in the dolls' house garden stash and found a bench for the lads to sit on ~ they were very happy to relax and watch me, offering lots of "helpful advice" as I'm sure you can imagine 😄

And then there was the basement...

As I mentioned in my previous post not only are there a whole heap of issues with the upper house, the basement isn't problem-free either 😒  It's called the Copford basement and I've had it so long that I can't even remember what company made it!  What I do know, however, is that I bought it because I wanted an additional floor and it was close to the size of the Somerby house.

Its opening panels are on the sides so that creates a bit of a problem straightaway.  Because my ultimate aim is to have it in our new porch, every time I want/need to get to the rooms I shall have to turn the house since the cabinet it will be displayed on won't be sitting in the middle of the room in splendid isolation!  However that's not too much of a problem because I don't think I will actually be needing/wanting to get inside every five minutes.   

 

Nope, a far bigger problem takes us right back to the thorny issue of stairs yet again *sigh*  Before I removed the lower section of the back of the upper house, I balanced it on the basement (minus its base) so that I could see how things lined up.....or didn't, as you can see.  To be fair, I wasn't really expecting the walls to line up since the basement wasn't made for the house.  Had the rooms in the basement been set the other way around, though, then I think the dividing wall wouldn't actually have been that far off being in line with the walls on the left-hand side of the upper house.

I've finally come to the conclusion that the most sensible solution for the upper house is to make the rooms on the right smaller, so that the landing areas can be large enough to accommodate dog-leg staircases.  I've been saving cardboard boxes so that I've got plenty of material to try some mock-ups before I commit to anything 😄  I shall also have to go down this route with fitting stairs from the basement.  I think I shall get the stairwells cut out in the upper house, including the base, then use said base as a template for the top of the basement.  I will cut out the corresponding hole for the stairwell and see what I can do to alter the dividing wall in the basement to accommodate it.  Of course had the upper house and basement been three or four inches deeper I could have had runs of straight staircases, which would have been very much simpler all round. 

This wall needs some alterations anyway because I want the doorway between the two rooms set closer to the front wall.  It may come down to having to actually move the wall further to the left so that it is in line with the walls in the upper house.  The problem with that is that the walls are all set in routed out grooves, so I would either have to try to rout some new grooves or trim down the wall so that it is simply set between the base and the ceiling.  As they say, watch this space 😉    

So after Derek and I had had a long chat about all the staircase issues, he pointed out other problems he and Albert had come across too.

First of all, the doorway from the basement out to the garden area is simply not tall enough ~ it's not very wide either!  What do you think of Derek's pink trainers, by the way?  He wore them all day for a bet ~ I believe he won a few pints down at his local that evening 😄 

It would be very awkward getting out of the door beneath those steps to the upper house.

The steps themselves are also somewhat steep, narrow...

and uncomfortable to walk up and down.

And just look at all that unusable space beneath what is meant to be used as the pavement!

The upshot of all this was that after consultations with Sir Peter, Lady Constance, and Christopher the decision was made that the entrance to Augusta Lodge will be moved to the side of the basement, as I mentioned in the previous post.  This really opens up the space in front of the basement, which will make a nice little courtyard garden in due course.  There are going to be a number of alterations made to the front house wall of the basement ~ it's a bloody good job I've got that shiny new tool so I can help the lads out 😄

I'm pretty sure the lads weren't terribly thrilled when I showed them the schedule of works Sir Peter and I had drawn up (that's what's on the clipboard on the right) even though I bought them a couple of shiny new saws ~ especially young Graham, who I expect sees his future holding much more physically exerting work than he is used to 😄 

Peace...

www.allposters.co.uk

Father, Mother, God,

Thank you for your presence during the hard and mean days.

For then we have you to lean upon.

Thank you for your presence during the bright and sunny days.

For then we can share that which we have with those who have less.

And thank you for your presence during the Holy Days.

For then we are able to celebrate you and our families and our friends

For those who have no voice, we ask you to speak.

For those who feel unworthy, we ask you to pour your love out in waterfalls of tenderness.

For those who live in pain, we ask you to bathe them in the river of your healing.

For those who are lonely, we ask you to keep them company.

For those who are depressed, we ask you to shower upon them the light of hope.

Dear Creator, You, the borderless sea of substance, we ask you to give to all the world that which we need most.....PEACE.

Maya Angelou

(4th April 1928 - 28th May 2014)  

Demolition...

image from Clipart Library

...albeit on a mini scale 😉

This is Augusta Lodge, which is to be the new home of Lady Constance and her brother, Christopher.  It's the first dolls' house I bought, a very long time ago, and I never did get it built ~ as you can see!  It's the Somerby House made by Barbara's Mouldings, I believe.  There were issues with it right from the start which had I been more experienced in the world of dolls' houses I would perhaps have picked up on.  And since it's just been hanging around waiting for me to do something with it, the problems have increased what with warping and bits falling off!

Now that my dolls' house tastes have become more "sophisticated", for want of a better word, I was sorely tempted to just scrap the thing altogether!  But my bloody-mindedness kicked in and I decided to have a go at making it into what I ~ well, to be more accurate I suppose I should say what Lady Constance and Christopher 😉 ~ want it to be.  Because the house, for me personally, is so disappointing I haven't really got anything to lose if my kit-bashing totally wrecks it or my ambitions prove to be greater than my capabilities.  Mind you Lady Constance and Christopher may be a tad upset if I can't rebuild it 😄 

The biggest issue is how unrealistic the stairs in the house are.  The original layout had straight staircases from one floor to the next with no landings running alongside the stairwells.  The people were expected to turn to the left or right at the top of the stairs, and walk through that room to get to the next set of stairs ~ I'm sure you can see how irritating I found this!  So even back when I first got the thing I tried to remedy the situation by moving one of the walls further to the right to make a landing, even though I had to sacrifice some of the space in the room.  As for access into the attic, as far as I can recall I don't believe there was any from within the house, even though the front of the roof was hinged to allow access from outside 😒

So I rolled up my sleeves and dug out my trusty little stubby hammer and an old screwdriver.  The latter is a little bent (not by me, I hasten to add!) and I have no idea where it came from but I thought it would be the ideal accompaniment to the hammer for the purposes of demolition.

I took it slow and steady, and the attic floor and sides of the house came apart without too much trauma.  Because the head of the screwdriver is small I was able to gently tap it into the areas where the house has been glued together and prise things apart.  The back panel is made up of two pieces and the top section came away fairly easily.  

The lower section, though, was much more reluctant, perhaps because it was covering more of the back and so was glued to more sections of the house.  At one point I seriously thought about just leaving it be, but because I need to move the stairwells I decided to persevere as the job would be a tad easier if the whole of the back panel was removed.

If I could have "flat-packed" the house entirely I would have done so but decided not to push my luck any further!  I shall just have to make the new stairwells as best I can with the floors/ceilings still in place.  I'm sure ceiling paper and floorboards will hide a multitude of repair sins 😏 

Decisions then had to be made about the front panels.  The house is being set on a basement (more about the traumas of that to come!) and the entrance will be from the ground floor.  This means that the space for the door on what has now become known as the "upper house" is redundant.  I also can't find any of the window inserts that came with the house so decided the best thing would be to change the windows altogether.

In fact the whole façade is going to be changed as I didn't really care for this stepped-out section...

..so used my tried-and-tested hammer and screwdriver technique to prise it off.  I think it looks much neater now and hopefully will make it a little easier to resize the window holes for the new windows in due course.

Still lots and lots to do including the trauma of the basement which I'll share in my next post 😳

Little words of wisdom

 

An early anniversary gift

This is actually from Adrian to me, just in case you were wondering 😉  Well, I did tell you that now my craft room is all spick-and-span I'm going concentrate on my little dolls' house world  ~ I've got a lot of Very Big Plans for Hazelton😄  

The "renovation" of Hazelton ground to a halt, mostly because I really didn't have anywhere suitable to display all the houses I let myself be tempted to buy and totally lost interest.  Now, though, I've got the space to both work on them and display them too.  

I have introduced you to the little trio above previously but it's such a long time ago that I'm sure you will have forgotten all about them!  So just to refresh your memories we have Constance, Lady Buchanan (usually simply known as Lady Constance even though she is now widowed), her twin brother Christopher Long, and her son Sir Peter Buchanan.  Lady Constance is quite the force of nature and likes to Get Things Done ~ nevertheless, she is very kind-hearted and is much liked and admired by the folk of Hazelton 😊

Sir Peter with his wife, Lady Elizabeth, and their 16 year old daughter Miranda.

Christopher never married or had any children.  He has always been very much a father figure to Peter and is very close to his nephew and his family.  Sadly Peter's own father was a very unpleasant man and despite Lady Constance's best efforts, he made Peter's childhood miserable ~ he was an equally unpleasant husband, too.  So much so that Peter was glad to be sent away to boarding school, especially as the school he was sent to was where Christopher had a long academic career teaching history and religious studies. 

Christopher and Lady Constance with their housekeeper, Beatrice Fisher.

And this, my lovelies, is the first house to be tackled in those Very Big Plans 😲  It will eventually be the new home of Lady Constance and Christopher.

But never fear, I have my trusty band of building contractors to assist 😉  You have also met the lads before but just to recap we have Albert Holland and Derek Landry, co-owners of Landry and Holland which is a building and general maintenance company, and Derek's son Graham, who they employ as a painter and decorator.

image from Clipart Library

You have no idea ~ yet! ~ of the work involved in this renovation so wish the lads and I luck 😄 

Who stole the soil mountain 😲

Well, no one has actually stolen it to be fair but we have whittled it down considerably!  Look, up there under the blue tarp ~ that's all there is left 😮  And since I took these photos, even that pile has decreased by nearly two-thirds!  Adrian has worked so hard sieving all that bloody soil and finally he got to the stage where he was determined that it would just all be over and done with 😄  Now, of course, we've got gazillions of bags of rubble to get rid of but that's another story 😉

It's taking a bit of getting used to not having that weed-ridden mound of soil staring at us every time we walked by but it's so lovely to finally have the area cleared.  Adrian used up the remaining leftover sleepers to build the last couple of raised beds that will be going in the garden, front or back.  And, of course, filled them up with some of the mountain.  Over in the left-hand corner is the other container that had been out the front with the black stained ones.  I haven't yet decided what to plant in any of the containers.  

Adrian also flexed his muscles and wheel-barrowed a whole one ton bag of stone chippings that we'd had delivered onto the shared driveway.  We had two more lifted over our garden wall into the kitchen garden area to be used in due course topping up various parts of the garden, both front and back ~ he had to use another half dozen or so barrow-loads from one of them to finish the job.  I raked it all out as he dumped it and amazingly we finished the job in one day!

Next year we will look for some nice all-weather furniture to put out there to make a cosy seating area.  We are also going to put some large tubs, or perhaps barrels like we've put in the front, along the wall and will move the raspberries into them.  

And talking of raspberries here is a little bowl of some of what we've harvested this year, along with one of the mini cucumbers from the greenhouse.  We've had lots of strawberries too, as well as the cut-and-come-again lettuce, and the tomatoes are finally starting to ripen up 😊

Peace...

www.allposters.co.uk

Father, Mother, God,

Thank you for your presence during the hard and mean days.

For then we have you to lean upon.

Thank you for your presence during the bright and sunny days.

For then we can share that which we have with those who have less.

And thank you for your presence during the Holy Days.

For then we are able to celebrate you and our families and our friends

For those who have no voice, we ask you to speak.

For those who feel unworthy, we ask you to pour your love out in waterfalls of tenderness.

For those who live in pain, we ask you to bathe them in the river of your healing.

For those who are lonely, we ask you to keep them company.

For those who are depressed, we ask you to shower upon them the light of hope.

Dear Creator, You, the borderless sea of substance, we ask you to give to all the world that which we need most.....PEACE.

Maya Angelou

(4th April 1928 - 28th May 2014)  

A few tweaks

It's hard to believe that it's five years since we had the fireplace opened up and the wall around it stripped back to the original stonework.  Five years it is, though, and over those years the wood-burner we had fitted really hasn't aged well at all.  So we decided to bite the bullet...

and have a new one fitted, along with a new hearth.  This time we thought it prudent to go with a well-made stove from a well-known company and chose the All New Island I from Charnwood which we purchased through an extremely helpful company, Bonk & Co in Inverness.  In particular we wanted a stove with two opening doors to make it easier to get the logs in, something that wasn't always the case with our old stove.

The original hearth wasn't the right size either, not even for the old stove to be honest, so we had that replaced too.  On reflection we could probably have gone for a slightly smaller hearth, especially since the new stove is set further back into the chimney recess, but the size of this one doesn't encroach too much into the living room and gives us lots of space to stack the logs ready to use.  We are really pleased, as I'm sure you can imagine 😊

We've done some rearranging in the garden, too, and replaced the containers that were here...

with barrels instead.  We wanted to use those containers elsewhere and as an added bonus, we were able to fill up the new barrels with some of that soil mountain 😉 

They actually look very much nicer than the containers that were there originally.  I haven't decided what to put in the barrels yet but the plants will most likely be perennials of some kind, perhaps evergreens.

And here are two of those containers set out in their new positions in the back garden, along with the metal table and chair which both came with us when we moved up here.  I put the herbs back that had originally been in them ~ I think they were glad to get out of the pots I'd temporarily put them in!  Because the bay and the rosemary are now in their own big pots, I was able to get the remaining herbs into just one container.  Which reminds me, said bay and rosemary are both doing really well in their nice big pots ~ I'll try to remember to take photos to show you how much happier they look now 😊

We obviously had to empty out the containers to be able to move them, so took the opportunity to do a little repair work to their bases and gave them three coats of wood stain to smarten them up.   

And just to finish off, here's a photo of my sister and I taken on our recent little jaunt up to Shetland 😍