The not-much-fun bedroom

For some reason this apartment bedroom seemed to be a pig of problem from start to finish.

First of all there were six pairs of LED lights wires lying across the floor from the ceiling below.  They each had the neck of the fitting slightly protruding above the floor. Rather than making six deep grooves to get the wires and neck laid down properly I worked out a different tactic - a false floor.

I bought some 1/8th inch strips of wood from Hobby's  and used them like joists.  I put a strip right round the edge of the room, laid three inside this frame front to back and put in the occasional strip across (for additional support) where the wires would allow.  On top of this I glued a sheet of cardboard (thin but fairly rigid) for the new floor.

So all that worked out reasonably OK and I photographed each step of the way for this how-to-do-it post - then I wiped the card in the camera thinking I had downloaded the photos - I hadn't.

Here is the finished front edge - now that's a useful tutorial.

the edge of the false floor

I then wallpapered and added the usual coving but held off on the skirting.  Much ifs and ands and buts went into the decision to put carpet down first and then add the skirting.  I like realism and, in real life, carpet certainly goes down after the skirting is in place, but I had the sense to realise that my carpet would fray a good deal and the edges would never go down neatly  Any way when I look at my RL fitted carpet it is sort of almost rolled over at the edges to make a neat edge and it looks like the skirting is sitting on top of it.

I have never carpeted a room in a dollshouse - no, I couldn't believe it either.  I found it something of a pain to do.  The carpet seemed to stretch every which way and cutting it to fit round the door and door frames, trying to make that a nice tidy fit, was a pain; not to mention just getting the front edge to end up exactly in the right place.  Once I had got the front edge OK I daubed it with fray stop and gently 'pushed' it into the pile with my finger.  It seems to be holding OK so far.  I used the usual double sided tape but I only added it as I went along so the fabric didn't catch where I didn't want it to as I worked.

Down went the skirtings.  Ta dah - the end?...... not so, I had always planned a door at the back of the room to go to a bathroom.  Moral dilemma....... leave everything as it is (no-one else knows there 'should' be a door) or find a way to cut out a piece of the skirting (perfectly) and shove the door in.

paper and trims all in place

I used a knife with a broad edged blade like a chisel and hacked away at the wood.  It took absolutely ages. I thought that levering the whole piece of skirting out to cut out the piece would make such a mess of the wallpaper and the adjoining skirting so I wasn't prepared to risk it.  Finally I had hacked through to the back wall in both places and I levered out the door size section using a small screwdriver - out popped the whole skirting clean as a whistle.  Fortunately there was no collateral damage other than some wallpaper torn and the door would cover that any way!! So I removed the piece and duly glued the two sections back in again.

In went the door into the newly created space.....

ditto above plus false door

Here is the furniture I have so far for this room.  There will be a small matching side table and a plain small table to fit in the dormer window space for a desk and a chair for that.  The wardrobe and drawers do open.  Unlike some mini friends I may resist the temptation to fill them.....I love the idea but not the cost.  It would be a delight for anyone 'playing' with the finished house to discover such things but, sadly,  that won't happen.  I have never kept a house to 'play' with.  I really like the making and moving on.  That said, this one was meant to be my first keeper, so you never know.

(05/10/17)

The floor

 Here comes a detailed step by step description of the music room floor going down - feel free to skip it.

My favoured flooring is a real wood walnut flooring made by Houseworks.  It can be bought in the UK and the USA.  It is a great quality product, nice colour and accurate size floor boards for Georgian houses. Wider floorboards are late Victorian onwards.  It measures 11 x 17 inches so is a good size and generally covers most floors in one sheet.  Costs £9.95 from Jennifers of Walsall.

First step is to cut out whatever is needed to cover your floor.  You can now use the board as it is is or wax or varnish it.  I use a satin finish B & Q water based varnish, easy to apply, easy to clean up with soap and water and you can get a small tin which has lasted me over four years!  Handy tip - decant to a jar as the tin not only gets 'gummed' up, it also tends to rust and drop bits in the varnish - same with paints - all mine go in jars.  After the first coat is dry (overnight) if you rub your hand over the surface it will feel really rough this is the action of liquid on wood.  To denib it I use one of those nail buffers I mentioned in the painting post a couple of posts ago. One quick buff over is enough, don't over-do it or you will just remove  the coat of varnish and then be starting again.

They then get a second coat.  This will have made the sheets curl up a little.

When absolutely bone dry I layer the sheets between baking parchment (any silicone based thing will do) to be sure they won't stick to anything and weigh them down overnight.

In the morning I have nice flat sheets of finished flooring to put in the house.  I keep the parchment for same again or painting or gluing on, useful non stick stuff.

The most important edge in the room is the one running across any doorway, others will be covered with skirting board so they don't need fussing with.  The floor running along the door edge needs to but up to it without the tiniest gap.

My door in this room happens be at the back but I can't start with a piece of flooring back there.  It is important to lay the floor from the front edge so that it runs perfectly in line with the front edge of the house.

First mark up where any seams will go, you will need these places covered in sticky tape or glue if you use that.  Not keen on the idea of glue all over, makes removing the floor nigh on impossible.  Haven forbid you will ever have to.... but if you do.....

My sticky weapon of choice is very thin double sided sticky tape - not the foam kind which would make the floor stand proud of the surface but any which is as thin as sellotape - indeed it is actually thinner than that when the wax paper is peeled off.

Tape all the across points - here I have taped the front edge - right to the very edge, then I taped where the seam will be, about two thirds down the room, and then the back edge, finally I ran another line  and another line between the seam and front edge.  I now needed to lay a vertical piece down for the seam which runs front to back, so the protective paper has to be peeled back to allow that to go in place.

The front right piece of floor goes in first to ensure a good edge at the front of the room

Then the back right piece.  The challenge here is to make sure it joins well with the front piece and buts up against the door sill perfectly.

............the front left goes in next, again checking that front edge really carefully.

.......... then the back left section and it is done.

You could now give it another coating of varnish in hopes of pulling the seams together a bit more, or a couple of coats of wax polish or, as I do, nothing!

Major learn from this ...  I don't remember having had a a room so wide that I had to join the flooring with a seam running from the front to the back of the room before.  The seams do show.  How much this will annoy me when the rugs are down and furniture is in I don't know but I so wish I had turned the flooring the other way round.  If the boards had run front to back the joins would not show at all!!!  I considered it briefly but always prefer the boards to run across the rooms (we read left to right so it is less jarring on the eye?) and I wasn't sure it would make a huge difference and I didn't want one 'odd' room.  I now regret that choice.  I am not ripping it out and redoing it at this stage as the fireplace has also been put in place and it would mean all kinds of messes to deal with.



(8/5/17)

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)

Floors - Sitting Room

I am sure I must have covered floors (accidental pun!) several times in my posts but I am conscious that not everyone finding a blog has the time or patience to back up and read previous posts; so, for them, and as my own record of the build, here's a brief look at the floor going down in the sitting room.  [If you do want finer details of how-to just click on the floors link in the left hand column and every time I've mentioned a floor, the post should be there.]

For this room and probably all of the remaining rooms I am using my very favourite flooring.  This is real walnut laid in perfect scale strips on a backing paper.  Mine comes from the States via Jennifers of Walsall so I know you can get it on both sides of the pond.  It is absolutely the best quality I have found for real wood flooring.

the best real wood flooring

First of all I make a template of the floor using real life wallpaper.  Make as many as it takes until you get a perfect fit.  Don't compromise or you will end up with problems later.

paper template and the cut floor being tested

Using the template I cut out the floor.  Be careful about making sure you lay the template the right way up on your flooring; it is too easy to flip the shape of the room and then nothing fits and you have wasted a (not-cheap) piece of flooring.  I always turn my flooring over face side down and then lay the template on top of that also face side down, mark up round the edges, and if there is no identifying cut out, for a fireplace for example, I also write which is the top right hand corner, so it doesn't get rotated when I put it in place.

The flooring is in two sections as this is a deep roomed dolls house.  I always start with the full depth of the flooring being used for the front section of the room.  This puts the join as far back into the room as I can get it, so if there is any issue with the join its not as visible from the front of the house.

The floor is then given two coats of water based, quick drying clear satin varnish.  You can choose a range of methods to finish the wood.  You may just want to leave it as it is but you won't get the lovely colour and grain of the wood.  You could just use use a couple of coats of clear wax polish, or a gloss varnish if you want a high shine or do a proper three or four stage wood finish - the choice is entirely yours depending on your skill and the required finish.  This couple of coats of varnish is fine for me.  Don't over-wet the piece, remember it is wood and wood and water are not happy companions.  After the first coat is dry it is best to rub down gently with very, very fine sand paper 400 is best 200 up will do; best of all use a painters sponge that is designed for rubbing down paint between coats.

Remove all the sanding dust carefully and work on a clean surface and apply the second coat.

first coat done

My floors go down with double-sided sticky tape as I want to be above to remove them should the need arise - repairing/replacing a light in the room below for example.

Only use tape that is as thin as ordinary sellotape otherwise the wooden flooring will stand away from the floor beneath .  I got out all my rolls to see if I could give you a brand name - needless to say they are all blank.  The wide roll is sold as carpet tape but it is very thin for that! They all look chunky here because of the wax paper covering the tape.  I promise you they are as thin, if not thinner, than sellotape when in situ.

very thin double-sided tape

I use a wide strip right across where the join will go and another wide strip along the front edge of the room.  Then I dot bits and bobs around to help hold the floor down nicely.  I don't bother around the walls as the skirting will clamp that down

waiting for the paper to be peeled off

Lay down the front piece first to ensure that the front edge runs perfectly along the exposed front edge of your floor.  Lay the joining piece behind starting at the joint and working away from you.  Use a soft cloth to rub it down in place.

You can of course choose the direction of the floorboards.  In real life they lay in the direction mine do here (across the joists).  Which ever direction you choose it is best that the floors in the whole house 'run' the same way. 

So here it is all done.....

(22/05/16)

Tiles for hall floor

I bought my tiles for the hall a long time ago from another favourite vendor.  He sells lovely materials at a great price and is super-helpful - Dolls House Tiles (just click on the name).

They are a very thin accurately cut laminate which give a great marble finish.  You decide on the pattern you want.  I do that by playing around with ideas on some on graph paper.  I have a very small hall so it demanded utmost simplicity, but the tiling world is your oyster if you so wish.  What you need is easy to calculate and the vendor will help if you are struggling with something - he also is happy to do bespoke.

It is then as simple as sticking them down with PVA.

I left a hefty book on mine overnight (on non stick paper) to make sure they were as flat as a pancake.

So easy and a great result.

The area floors

After doing a few thousand bricks I am pretty much doing more of the same.  I used Richard Stacey versi slabs for the floor of the area.  They come with a buff side and a slate side so a choice of two finishes.  I am working with the buff stone side here.

measure the floor

First measure the floor

transfer to wallpaper 

Draw up this area on a piece of paper.  I use wallpaper - great size for all areas you will ever want, nice weight and loads of it and all for a pound from the left over wallpaper bin in a sale.  In truth the pieces you might be seeing for a long while are large sample pieces from B and Q and Laura Ashley - they are 'genuine' as we are redecorating the whole house so I didn't just scam them.

No idea why I am marking up on the pattern side (????)  Cut out the shape slightly oversized.

paper inside the space

Push the paper into the space and use your finger nails or back of scissors or weapon of choice to push into the edges to clearly mark up what you need to trim off.

mark the orientation

Trim to fit and put back int he space and check the accuracy of the fit.  I always mark one corner underneath to make sure it comes out and goes back in the right way round each time.  Spaces are rarely perfectly rectangular.

Paint paper 

I don't want the white paper to show between the cracks so I paint it with whatever dark colour I have.  Let it dry - well nearly! - I am too impatient.  Stick on the random slabs.  Being Mrs Symmetrical, I hate random.

under weights 

I then sandwiched it between a non-stick piece of silicone paper (glue side) and a chopping board and loaded it with books, I left it overnight to flatten and (almost) dry out.

Cover area with glue

Next day I covered the base with my favourite wallpaper glue.  I used a glue spreader for about a nano-second before I reverted, as I always do, to the best glue spreader - my fingers.  Usually my floors go down using double side sticky paper in case I need to remove them (wiring underneath etc).  I got brave here and stuck floor covering directly to floor.

et voila

The area is finished.  You will never see anything like this amount of it again.  Once the basement is glued to the doors you only get a glimpse from the pavement area.  Even so I am wondering if I should do something with it - after all my little people have to look at it through the windows. There again they can't access it easily.  If I was a good modeler it would be a bit grubby and maybe have a couple of weeds and some litter.  Then again I am reminded by all who know me that this isn't so if I lived there - it would be immaculate!