Back to the drawing board

There are days when I wish I could slap myself round the head!  I sail off with terrific ideas and never bother to check if they might actually work or not!

After writing about the lovely trims from Dolls House Cottage Workshop  I remembered that the second floor drawing room height is less than the ground floor's ten inches and realised that the large cornice might not leave enough room to get the door pediments in.  It turned out that it is only 7.75 inches high - not a chance.

aaarrrggghh!!

Indeed it doesn't even leave enough room for the basic door trim!

If I use the narrower version that was destined for the dining room, I can just manage both the cornice and the simple door trim.  They will still meet each other and I am not sure how awful that will look, but I can not see a way round it.

smaller trim is still a squeeze.

The design of this dolls house is problematic.  Two floors of rooms in a Georgian house demanded height - there would be no way to get in chandelier lights otherwise.  I know that stylistically they also look beautifully proportioned but it was more of a practical issue.  In a decent house a drawing room demanded lovely overhead lighting.  Think of the glorious ceilings you needed to display.

Chandeliers were not de rigueur in dining rooms because in that room you wanted to light the food and your seated guests, so candelabras were the order of the day.  However you would still have high ceilings because somewhere on that level you wanted an impressive vestibule and hallway where, again, suspended lights would be useful and beautiful.

Most dolls houses are designed with a traditional arrangement in mind (from children's dolls houses) where the second floor automatically becomes bedrooms.  For someone like me who doesn't want to regard what we get as the whole house and has a need to get it as right as possible that won't work.  So this house totally scuppers this and I am reduced to not having a chandelier in the drawing room where I need and want one but I could squeeze one into the dining room where I don't want it.

If I had the simplest of chandeliers in the drawing room it would still need a minimum drop of three feet  which leaves 4 feet 9 inches space below to walk under it.  I know people were shorter then but I don't think we can count on everyone being that small!

So, I hear you say - reverse the rooms.  Can't be done.  The drawing room can not go on the ground floor (in real life it is unlikely it would be there any way) because the ground floor has to accommodate a vestibule and then an equal sized room either side.  Neither of these rooms is especially capacious and won't lend themselves to being a drawing room.......but they do have a ten foot (10 inch) ceiling height.

As my unusually squat but reasonably roomy drawing room won't allow for the larger trims they are now going into the dining room instead.  It is not really a room large enough to support such a trim but I can always make up a story to make it fit.

The house is a 1750's build so, early in its life, it acquired overblown Georgian trims to impress.  These remain in the dining room; whereas the drawing room was refurbished by the sisters at a much later date and is a more delicate, discrete, plainer Regency finish.

That'll do for me.