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 😕

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 😄 

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 😳

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 😄 

Ooooh, I won a prize!

Every so often, I have a little browse in a lovely miniature art store on Etsy: Art In Wax.  The owner and artist, Hazel, is equally as lovely as the encaustic wax art that she creates.  It seems that whenever I pop by "just to have a look" I always end up tempted by one of her creations, and on my most recent visit I was tempted by the gorgeous Bluebell painting above.   

You can imagine how excited I was when Hazel contacted me to say that my Bluebell purchase was her 2,000 sale and I was to choose anything in her store that I liked as a gift to mark the occasion ~ how lovely was that, eh!  I chose this gorgeous Modern Poppies picture.

And not only that, Hazel also included a surprise painting!  So now I have three more pieces of her lovely artwork to add to my collection 😊

I seriously lost my dolls' house mojo over this past year or so, but I'm happy to report that I'm feeling the love again ~ hence my visit to Hazel's store in the first place LOL  I don't expect to be beavering away in my craft room just yet as there is still so much work to be done out in the garden.  But non-gardening weather will be upon us again at some point which will be the ideal time to get back to building Hazelton.  It'll be good to get at least some of those dolls' house ideas out of my head and into reality as it's getting rather crowded in there! 

New tenants already!

Well, the shop units have barely been started but they have new tenants already 😊  Tabitha Tottley (in the pink dress) and Effemy Lamb had already applied to the town council for shop spaces in Angel House Galleria, but when these new shops came onto the rental market they decided to apply for them instead.

Just to recap, Effemy is a local Hazelton girl and whilst she was at school she had a Saturday/holiday job at the Hazelton Garden Centre.  She especially enjoyed working with the flowering plants and decided to train as a florist when she left school.  Effemy loves everything French ~ her maternal Grandmother is French ~ so took the opportunity to do her floristry training in Paris.  She lived with her Grand-mere and was lucky enough to find work in a rather lovely florist shop in the city.  Much as she loved Paris, her Grand-mere and the beautiful shop she worked in Effemy was very homesick for Hazelton, and her family and friends there.  Her best friend, Nessa Quinn, wrote to tell her about the plans for the Galleria which is how Effemy came to apply for a shop space in the building.  She was very excited when her application was successful, but when these new spaces became available she thought that having a shop on street level would be more commercially viable.  She is really looking forward to taking the next steps in her floristry career with a shop of her own.

Tabitha has lived in Hazelton for about 12 years now, having moved there to look after her great aunt who was seriously ill.  They hadn't been particularly close but were in regular contact by letter.  When she became poorly Tabitha didn't like the idea of the old lady spending her last few years in a care home so suggested that she come to look after her.  In actual fact the two of them got on very well, and despite the generation gap found that they had a surprising number of interests in common.  They were both a little sad that they hadn't had the opportunity to get to know each other better earlier but made the most of the time the aunt had left.  With Tabitha's loving care her aunt's remaining years were very happy despite her illness.  She eventually passed away peacefully some three years after Tabitha had come to live with her.  Tabitha made some very dear and close friends during those first three years and after her aunt passed away and bequeathed her little house and its contents to her, she decided to stay in Hazelton as it now felt very much like "home".

She has worked as a care assistant in Hackland House Residential Home for a number of years and although she loves working there, her dream was to be self-employed.  Since one of the interests Tabitha and her aunt shared was a love of antiques and vintage/vintage-style "pretty" things, she thought this would be the perfect kind of shop to have and decided to apply to the Town Council for shop space in the Galleria.  When she saw these new spaces, though, she thought the upper floors would be even nicer than having a shop space in the Galleria ~ the huge glass windows across the front would make for wonderful shop window displays.  Like Effemy, Tabitha is also very excited about having her own shop and starting a new career.

Looks like the guys and I need to get a wiggle on so that we don't keep the ladies waiting too long for their new dream shops.....I have a feeling they will both be making frequent visits to check up on our progress 😉

Decisions and a teensy wee bit of destruction!

Sir Peter and I have been discussing the way forward with this potential shop unit...

and we have decided to go with another Dolls House Emporium kit that I've also had for a number of years, The Retreat ~ again, I don't know if DHE still make this kit.

Whereas the Summer House kit had a much smaller footprint than the shop box, The Retreat is slightly larger being about 16mm wider...

and also overhanging at the back.

I don't think that either of these overhangs matter, to be honest.  I will sit the kit so that it overhangs at the sides equally and is flush with the front.  Hopefully I will be able to find a piece of moulding 8mm deep to smooth out the look of the transition from the upper shop to the lower.  Failing that I should think that I could combine some pieces to create the correct depth.

The Retreat comes with a deck area to which the front panel is attached ~ it lifts away rather than being hinged. I must admit that initially I was tempted to make use of it.

In the end, though, I've decided not to include it ~ not least because of the awkwardness of opening the ground floor unit.  I also think it looks rather clumsy.  I will hinge the front panel to the side instead.

The top floor has a nice amount of floorspace...

but not so much headroom!  Still, the space in the eaves can be used for built-in display shelves and storage cabinets.

And talking of headroom, the stair arrangement leaves much to be desired!  I think I will have to make the stairwell opening a tad larger.

There are more headroom issues coming up to the top floor.  I think the only way to solve this will probably be to put in a dormer window ~ which will have the added benefit of letting in more natural light, as there is only a small round window at the front.  I will put a matching dormer on the other side as well.

The stairs supplied with the kit really bother me, as to my mind they look more like a ladder and are rather steep ~ not at all suitable for a shop!  I know that some folk just don't bother with visible stairs but I find that that really bothers me, too!  I'm sure that Sir Peter and the guys will be able to come up with a good solution 😉

As the post title suggests, there has been some destruction going on in my craft shed as well as decision-making LOL  I decided to remove all the trimmings from the shop box and start off with a blank canvas.  As I mentioned in the previous post, the finish was not very good and it all looked somewhat flimsy!

There is still some prep work to be done before I can even start sanding the shop box.  There are sections of paper to be removed so that I can start with a nice smooth surface to work on.  I will have to lightly wet the paper and hope that it peels off without too much hassle.  I am also going to take the front off and clean up the hinges, as well as fit a new catch at the side.

So there is lots of basic work still to be done ~ I'd better have a site meeting with Sir Peter and the guys!