Neurotic, moi?

I am writing this on 19 February having been away from this blog and Dalton House since October.  A lot of real life stuff has got in the way and I find if I break for too long it is difficult to get back.

Today, I decided, was the day to pick up the reins.  Facing me right now are a lot of 'problems' with putting in two of my own interior walls - having changed the basic kit.  This has had a knock on effect with lighting and decorating and the order in which to do things.

I began the day there but decided I really needed to get back in slowly..... so it began with a tiny job I had also put off for a long while.

Some time ago I bought a pair of console lamps (pretty pricey) and one of them didn't have the little ball feet that the other one did and there were a couple of other (poorly made) issues.  The vendor gave me the name of the maker and said she would send feet and I could glue this and fix that etc.  No response from the maker so I needed to get things fixed.

had feet but the base wasn't glued

no feet on this one, so added those

I could only get silver (wanted gold) no hole beads at the last show I was at, so I used four of those for the feet.  They will be painted 'brass' soon.  I then then glued the bases in place on both of them.  Straightening the shades was a challenge as they were on a fine soldered frame which I didn't want to bend or break.  I then twisted the wire so that it looked more realistic.  It will show because it will travel through a plug and socket to exit the back wall to make it more realistic. 

my lovely little wall plugs that allow wires through

All this and then they will live at the back of the sitting room and be barely visible.

Don't fret, the table and the rug are not staying

Might keep the mirror - paint gold? or paint creamy white?

Luckily I know a couple of other mini folk who are as fussy as me about detail so I don't feel too bad.


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This footnote is being added in April!  You might not get a post for a while.  I banked a lot of posts months ago and this is the last of those.  I haven't actually been near the project since before Christmas.  I am doing my utmost this week to get back on track.  It isn't for lack of wanting to, I am just at 'sixes and sevens' with life stuff.  

(19/02/17)

A couple more tips when painting doors

I am painting a couple of opening doors (and one non-opener) ready for fitting the walls in place on the second floor.  These are usually done at a later stage after the walls have been decorated but this time, to make sure they open in the direction I want them to, they both need to go in behind the walls before they go in place.

I always take the door out of the frame to make it easier to paint it neatly along the door jamb.  This can be a real difficulty sometimes if they are well-made; the door sill will have been glued in place really well and it takes a lot of wiggling and cutting with a knife to free it.

Suddenly, after five years in the game, I found a brilliantly easy way.

removing the bottom sill to free the door

Find a very small screwdriver and use it like a chisel.  I put it exactly over and a little bit in the join and tapped gently with a hammer - hey presto, all done.

Now for a couple of painting tips.  When you remove the door it will reveal the little pin holes visible in the door frame where you will want to return the door to eventually.  They fill up with paint very easily so, each time you give the frame a coat of paint, just make sure you clear the holes afterwards.  I like to use a very fine drill but anything of the right thickness will do - large sewing needle, piece of wire etc.

I am easily frustrated by waiting for paint to dry between coats so I make sure I paint all the pieces I will need for the job I am about to do.  That way the first piece is often dry enough to flip over and allow me to paint the other side by the time I get to the end of all the bits and bobs.  So paint the two sided pieces first, then all the one-siders; remember the order you did them in.

Even then as a belt and braces check I prop the doors on the door frame with as little contact as possible between them ready to paint the other side.  I was concerned that even when touch dry, if they lay face down on a surface, they can tack enough to spoil the finish.

All the trims are given two or three thin coats of paint.  I even add a tiny bit of water to the paint to thin it a little.  A real life coat of paint needs to be reduced to one twelfth of its thickness; not literally, but you get the idea.

They are buffed between coats with the finest finishing pads I can find.  These door have had their second coat of paint and now I am looking at the tiny gaps where the panels slide behind the frames.  On their third and final coat these need to be found and filled in.  It can be annoying when you have a door sideways on and every time you look at it you see a tiny black line where there is a gap in the wood.

Beware, if you keep following this blog, you may become as pernickity as me!

(28/11/16)

Making my life difficult

If you start to add other dimensions to your house never, never think it is a simple thing to do ...... always do a ton of dry builds and dress rehearsals.  You should detail it down to where the furniture will go and certainly what you are going to do about the lighting.

As you saw in the previous post I have got the space behind the library wall sorted - trompe l-oeil in place, the light is in the ceiling and the floor is down.  

background finished?

Once the doorway is painted and set into the back of the wall the whole thing can go in place. 

back wall looks OK?

 Then I can do the same with the side wall and I will be ready to get on with creating the library. 

side wall looks OK?

Then I decided I want to have a light on the side wall which divides the library and the music room.

square piano and the wall light changes everything

Here's how this came about.....

I bought a nice pair of girondelles to go on either side of the fireplace on the back wall; very easy to fit with wires straight through the back of the house.  At Miniatura I succumbed to a huge mirror over the (also newly bought) fireplace rather than the planned painting above the originally purchased and planned fireplace!  Clearly I can't now add another two mirrors on that wall.  They will have to go on the side walls.  

This make for a problem or two. 

The left hand wall is the outside wall of the house; if the wires go straight through how do I get them to the back in a tidy way?  Right now I think I will make the groove on the inside of the wall down to the floor and then exit the usual way in grooves across the floor under the floorboards.  This means I really could do with wallpaper over that groove and filler (?) to ensure a decent finish.  I have no idea how you put in a light and wallpaper - chicken and egg conundrum.  Can't paper first as then there is no way of putting the wire behind it.  Can't  paper second as I don't know how to get behind or around the light.  

When I solve the chicken/wall v. egg/light wiring problem the right hand wall will be marginally less problematic as the wire can go straight through the wall and be hidden behind the bookshelves in the library and then exit the back in the usual grooved way.  Then I realised  ..... oh heck, the wires have to cross the newly floored corridor.... so flooring has to come up.  I did consider just lobbing them across the gap on top of the floor but I never feel comfortable about things not being seen through doorways and I have two of them going into that space.

The next knock on effect is symmetry, as you can see in the above photo, the light can not be centered on the length of the wall as it would look odd in relationship to the doorway so it needs to be centered on the remaining wall space.  That's fine until you go to the other side of the room and now the opposing light will be no where near the centre of that wall!!  

I think I have this solved by adding more to the symmetry of the room.  The door into the room is at the back of the room so I will have a mock door on the opposite wall - the Georgians did a lot of this to maintain balance.  You often find them either side of a chimney breast (but I wanted that space for seats).   It could also be a door to a shallow cupboard between the houses that too is a credible possibility.  My childhood house did that on a party wall - one house had a cupboard beside the chimney on one side and the house next door had the mirror image on the other side.  Great for storage, not so great for privacy.

So, here endeth the lesson.  Practice, practice, practice until you are sure before you start putting walls in place.  

Hopefully, my next post will be about getting the problems solved and having these two walls in place at last.



(28/11/16)

Tips, Tricks and cheats

Some of the following may be repeats from earlier posts, but not everyone faithfully follows every syllable I utter so I just keep recording what I am doing  as I do it and, now and then, I repeat myself.  Hopefully there is something new here, or a timely reminder for my constant companions.


If, like me, you hate fringes on rugs and want to get rid of them I have figured out a nice quick solution.  Until this rug I have used PVA glue or Fray Stop or Mod Podge and spent many a jolly moment waiting for it to tack up sufficiently to hold down the edge when I folded it over or cut it off.  Here's a faster way.....

chop off the fringe pretty near the white selvedge

run a strip of narrow double sided sticky tape across the edge on the reverse of course

carefully fold over and stick down the edge and add a bit of black felt tip pen along the edge to make sure the white band doesn't show when you flip the rug

et voila, a fringe-less rug.

I don't recommend this on real-life valuable Persian rugs if you have any!!

I then turned my attention to the neat little mirror I bought from Elite Petite.  

I like how thin the frame is

I used my favourite gold leaf pen to 'paint' it as I didn't want the grooves to gum up with paint.

just checking the height of the mirror

I have a superb 'how-to' which I have had for many years about how to hang pictures and mirrors - no idea where I got it from - it has no references on it regarding its origin.  I will scan it and blog it for you if I can find it.  The basic premise is, that art work should be hung with its centre at 60" (five feet/1.5m) to enable the viewer to look into the picture and not have to look up or down too much.  This also applies to mirrors.  Clearly there will be all kinds of exceptions to this, such as its placement in the room in relation to various piece of furniture.  As you can see my mirror is a little high (she is 5' 6", if scaled up) but it would look odd touching the mantle piece.

My next job for the day was to get on with lighting, papering and flooring the corridor behind the library.  I intend to have a door open to a corridor to add to the illusion of seeing the rest of the house behind this front slice.

Look carefully and you can pencil marks showing where the two walls will go and the four inch corridor space that will reside behind the library wall.   The tape is covering the wires from the light in the room below.

Let's light the corridor space.

Full size template of the area

I always use templates rather than measuring - saves a huge amount of time and mistakes.  The areas are never perfectly rectangular with nice, tidy ninety degree corners - a template doesn't care. So make a template the exact shape of the floor area you are working with.  This time I made it out of fairly stiff card which was nice to work with as it always kept its shape perfectly (of course).

I imagined the floor template to also be the ceiling above that corridor and I figured out where I wanted the light to go; I measured, marked and drilled a hole through the cardboard.  The sponge went underneath to drill into.

Template moved to the floor above, the wooden floor shows the corridor below

The template then moved to the floor above and was pushed snugly into the corner and against the back wall;  I marked through the hole with a pencil, removed the template and drilled a hole through the floor.  You then need to cut a groove for the wires to exit the back of the house and a corresponding hole through the back of the house.

simple bulb

I first fitted a light I don't want to use any where but it had a thick lampshade which soaked up a lot of the light.  I always have two or three spare wired bulbs in my leccy box so I wheeled one of those out instead as this light will never be seen.

couple of findings

I wanted something to stop the bulb just being pulled through the hole so I had a rummage through my findings box.  Either of these would work fine.  The hole is small enough to let the wires through but the rest then acts as a stopper against the drilled hole preventing the bulb going through.  You can use anything when its not being seen, even something like a shirt button would do

I went with the eyelet

Actually looks like a ceiling fitting, how cute.

Thread the wires through the hole at the back of the house; add enough tension to make the wires lie flat in the groove and tape down with masking tape.

Now I was off to sort the corridor wall and the floor.

The four inch space is the equivalent of a full corridor width and my original intention was to just paper the visible wall, add skirting, cornice and some flooring.  I tried various wall papers but the space was just 'boring' and I realised that if we followed the staircase as suggested by the trompe-l'oeil on the ground floor then it would also be visible in this space.  This small isolated corridor would make no sense as it is doesn't access the rest of the house in any way. 

A massive web search for an appropriate photo then ate up a lot of the day - this is how my play days often bowl along.  Meanwhile I could use the time usefully.  I cut the real wood sheeting that I use for the floors and applied a thin coat of silk (water based) varnish.  It was left to dry whilst I trawled the web and then it was rubbed down with painter's sponge and a second coat of varnish was applied.

unvarnished wood, varnished wood, painter's sponge

When it was dry I used double-sided tape to stick it in place.  This method makes the floor easy to remove should I need to.

occasional strips of double sided tape.

I used the photo I had clipped from somewhere and copied it to a word document which makes resizing it very easy as it is a simple drag from one corner until (in this case) it filled the A4 sheet.  The handy tip here is to use a good quality paper, or photo paper (matt not glossy of course) or even card.  I forgot this and printed the first one on the usual fairly cheap paper we generally use.  I spread wallpaper glue on the back and pasted it up.  The inks leached and bled and did all sorts of nasty things.  So - use a decent paper and/or use a spray mount glue if you have it - or, if like me you don't - use Pritt glue for the back so the paper doesn't get wet.

Trompe l'oeil - So far so good

My last task of the day was to take an internal door apart ready for painting.  It needs to go on the back of the wall before I put the wall in place.  Even this is a handy tip.  I have done several walls and then remembered the doors and you can bet they need to go in behind the wall so that the door opens the way you want it to.  It is a fun game fiddling a door and frame through a gap, smothered in glue, setting it upright and pulling it into place and trying to press all its edges down from the inside out.
Not this time, I have remembered to fix it in before the wall goes up.

First thing is to dismantle it.  Not especially easy to do without damaging it.  having said that I have always managed it.

Use a craft knife to cut and prise and push one of the bottom joints apart

The other side will now snap off easily

Gently pull the door out from the top

I am sure most people will just crack on and paint the doors without all this fuss but I hate the way you can't get into the door jamb properly with it fixed in place and I would much rather attack it this way.

Bit of a footnote - no pun intended - this is a handy little step stool for reaching the top of your house:

Roughly a foot square when closed, snaps open and cost about seven pounds in a sale, I think from Lakeland but I have seen them cheaper elsewhere.

So.... I hope there is something useful in all of this somewhere for you and you liked following a day in the life of........

(15/10/16)