Mud Room courtesy of ELF

Here comes what must be one of my top three vendors.... ELF Miniatures

If you look at the site it is described as modern miniatures and, yes, it is that in bucket loads.  This in itself is a rarity, BUT with a little imagination her flat pack kits can be tweaked and twiddled into a lot of other things - such as a Georgian linen press and a 19th century floor to ceiling cupboard in a shop - both of which I have used ELF for.

As I said the items are in flat pack kit form, BUT Elizabeth will make up things for you if required.  She also designs and cuts bespoke items - basically if you can dream it, she can produce it.  I think her prices belie the amount of work and time she commits to any project - in other words she is affordable.

Within a couple of days of sending a vague email about what I thought I wanted she had sent me not one but three design suggestions for my mud room.  I selected this one.

This room sits between the Hive (hobby room) and the children's Rec room.  Backed on to this room behind its back wall (invisible to us of course)  is the family's laundry with washer and dryer and linen storage.  This mud room is for anyone in the basement to make a cuppa or even a 'snack'.  It has a fridge and will have kettle and toaster.  This is to save kids and their friends trekking upstairs to the kitchen. It also has a washing machine and a very large sink for washing dirty stuff that they don't want to put in the laundry room washer.  Such things as muddy sports clothes, riding stuff etc can be washed here and the huge sink is terrific for muddy wellies football boots and the like.  It also sees its fair share of BBQ grill racks, plant pots and the like.  It is decidedly a mud room, not a utility room.

Here are the components needed to make the plan live:

work surface and lovely sink made to order by Elizabeth

cupboards and their trims

cupboard knobs, taps, rail for drip drying over sink

under cupboard strip lights

inside Miele fridge - removable racks and drawers

the fridge

Miele washer drum goes round, door opens using a lock switch (yellow) soap drawer opens

Miele washer, press the 'on'  button and it makes a washing/spinning noise and then the light flashes and it beeps to tell you the washing is done

Proper playtime!

Pass me a hod

Here are the versi bricks and slates I told you about earlier.

4,000 bricks to apply !!

only 500 slates to get in place

for the ridges on the dormer windows

lead flashing for around the dormers

thought I would consider this

I don't tend to use paper for walls or floors though I have seen it done well.  With that in mind I thought I would consider this for the pavement and the areas (outside space) in the basement.  Very good quality - quite heavy and nicely matt.  I am tempted to cut up each paver though and stick in place?????

Here's the link:  Richard Stacey

Back in my stride

Can anyone prevaricate, procrastinate and just generally dither as much as I do about any 'next step' in building the house.

My latest flap is whether to cover the boards in bricks and then add trim on top of those or to add the trims first and work round them.  Here's the thinking (aka dithering).

Trims first and then bricks makes for a flatter neater finish but cutting bricks into all kinds of shapes and sizes to dance around the trims is a real pain in the proverbial - I know because I have always done it this way.

This time I would like to just slap bricks everywhere and apply trims over them.... will it sit nicely on top of bricks and will the glue work OK?

Today's decision is to have a go at the second method.

Meanwhile I am becoming very disciplined about splitting my days in two so I get a ton of playtime.  In the olden days when I still had to go out to work the house still got 'run' just fine and we had clean clothes and food when needed so why do I devote whole days to 'real life' when it was once squeezed into weekends and a couple of hours each evening.

My current routine is to use the mornings on domesticity (and emails!!), cooking lunch for around one and then, after that I will work on my hobby until 6.30pm.  My commute to and from 'work' can be arduous each day as it is exactly seven steps door to door.  Lucky lady.

Here's what I have achieved in a couple of days.

camouflage doors painted now lots to think about

making exterior paint

just add this to your paint

Victorian trim, needs to come off

done (plus a cut finger) and the door removed for painting

painted all this lot

made the quoins look like quoins

The trims for this house are roughly cut and need work.  The two sets of quoins are done.  I have also tidied 13 windows with twelve panes each (!) and they are now sitting in their box awaiting paint.The thirteen stone trims which surround the windows also tidied up but they have been painted so are all ready to go.

It is lovely doing mindless jobs whilst listening to Radio i-Player.  I am a bit of a talk-radio fan and love Radio Four - mostly dramas and books.  I am currently following an interesting serial (The Secret History) so I particularly look forward to that each day.  This hobby allows for radio time, not much else in my life does.  Bonus.  

One smug lady.

Dolls House and Miniature Scene magazine

I have pretty much stopped writing for the magazine now but they do have a few of my pieces 'in stock' so I was pleasantly surprised to hear one of my show reviews is in this month's magazine - out yesterday.

22 painting small things

I don't usually put videos here - I assume if you want to see them you can do that by clicking the link in the left hand column but I do think this is a useful tip if you haven't come across it before.

PS: if you think the painting finish looks lumpy and dreadful that's because it is lumpy masonry paint.

Finishing the front of the house

I am switching away from working on rooms for a long while and will be working on getting the front of the house finished and the main doors hung.

There is no right or wrong order in which to do a build.  I have always done the main doors last.  I thought it was better they didn't get too much 'wear and tear' and risk of paint or other work damage from working on the rooms but this is a very different build to the ones that took just six months from start to finish.  

I am concerned about the pieces of basement and large doors hanging around my work-space.  They seem to be warping slightly which is scary and have certainly got a nick or two here and there from being shunted around.  They also commandeer a fair amount of space.  The prospect of all of this stretching in front of me for a couple of years seems silly.  Much more sensible (I hope) is to finish the outside access doors and hang them and the roof out of the way.  I can't hang them in an unfinished state as gluing on a few thousand versi-bricks without the board being flat down would be too much for anyone to go at and remain sane.

........ and so it begins ...........

The MDF is a pretty good mortar colour for a new build house so if that's your project just get on with gluing on the bricks.  Any house which has stood a while has mortar which is all shades of grey depending on damp and sun and all sorts of things.  I found when I did the versi-bricks the first time on Bentleys and stuck them straight to the MDF I was left with lovely straight cream coloured, rather shouty,  lines running row after row between the bricks - tidy but not realistic.  Admittedly only I could seem to see this!

On the next build - Chocolat - I devised a mortar base which worked really well.

Basically you find all your old scraps of paint and mix them together to form a sort of pale mud - if the mud is too dark just add some white or better still cream to get it to a rough sort of putty grey colour.  This is your first coat for the brick walls.

the only time rough painting is good!

Paint in all directions as roughly as you like this is mortar after all.  Do all the walls you are going to brick at the same time - obviously they are better if they all match.

Then take a small amount of this paint and add a little of whatever you have that might help it look dirty or damp - dark green, brown, grey, black, just about any dark scrap you have to hand.  Use a bit of sponge for speed, but a brush will do and add streaks and blobs here and there.

Repeat a couple of times with other tints added until you get a camouflage effect.

I promise you it works

Here's a picture from Chocolat to prove it looks right.  This is the sand coloured bricks Richard Stacey does.  I am back with the red brick of Bentleys for Dalton House.

remember this is at least three times larger than life

End of wiring (for now)

Between this blog and the videos, I have pretty much covered how to get a light or fire into your house ready for the grand tidy up at the back and the eventual meeting up with the power.  I will be covering the connecting part much, much further down the line.  If you follow me in any way you will be sick of hearing how I am trying to stretch out this build indefinitely as it will have to be my last one - no more room for another house and I won't want to 'give' this one away - so the connecting to power will be pretty much the last task.

Here are the three lights I was messing around with during the last few posts.

In the children's Rec room (EBay find)

In the Mud room

In the Hive

If you wonder what the heck those rooms are I have finally settled on what their names are.

The Rec room is pretty much what has always been called since the shift from the 17th to the 20th century!  

The Mud room was being called the utility room but I have now decided a house of this size will have a laundry/utility room backing on to this one but it is useful to have somewhere to wash muddy wellies and kid's dirty sports stuff and for Elizabeth to use when she is in the Hive working on her dollhousing projects.  I have sink, cupboards etc on order from ELF as I type - watch this space.

The Hive replaces 'workroom'.  I have had a posh workroom built in real life and got fed up calling it the hut as it is far too grand for that so it has become the Hive.  As Elizabeth is sort of my alter ego she too plays with minis in her Hive.

Confusing running alongside me!

I am unable to share vendors for these lights as two of them just came out of a box of lights I have since time immemorial; the third was just an eBay find.  You can find anyone of them without too much web trawling, they are pretty standard items.  

I used the Hive one in my Chocolat project and one of the bulbs sometimes needed a bit of a tweak to get it to light up.....  bet you can guess which of the three bulbs it was...... yup, the one facing the back of the room.  I live in hopes this one loves me.

Every one of these rooms will have more lights added as these don't exactly light up the room.  Rec room will have a couple of wall lights and maybe floor lamp.  The Hive will have a table lamp.  The Mud room will have under cupboard strip lighting.