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 😳