Pride and Prejudice room box

It has been ages since I blogged. Almost half a year. I still have two rooms and the whole basement to show in my tour of Womble Hall, I haven't finished The Borrowers, and I haven't shared the many small things I have been making every now and then. I will do it all in due time.

But right now I have just started on a new project, and as it always happens to me, I become obsessed. I am not even sure where exactly it came from, but I am doing a strictly academic event on Pride and Prejudice in September, and I am doing it together with a friend with whom I also did the Alice in Wonderland event, so as we were planning our workshop, she suddenly asked whether I would be making a room box. I hadn't considered it at all, but the event is for teachers, focused on what they can do with Pride and Prejudice, and of course you can encourage the students to draw, or write a diary, or trace the characters' travels on a map. But why not a room box?

Womble Hall is the right period, but I cannot take Womble Hall to work, and, to be fair, it took me two years to make (and there is still a lot to do), while a schoolteacher may need inspiration for something more manageable. Anyway, here I am, making a Pride and Prejudice room box.

I found a wine box slightly larger than the standard ones. It is not deep enough in relation to breadth and height, but there is not much I can do about it. I have considered and dismissed cardboard boxes. The height is more important because I want it to be a grand-ish room, with a high mantelpiece and a chandelier.

As anyone who has made a room box knows, it needs much more planning than one would imagine. It's not just about putting objects in a box. Environment is crucial. For instance, I need to decide what ceilings and floors I want, how I will decorate walls and so on. And before I can even start, I need to make a chimney breast. I have made several for Womble Hall, but this time I didn't use foam but cardboard. This picture is tremendously boring, but if this is a story of how I made the scene, you need to see it.

 

What you also see is grooves, and they would prove a nuisance.

Here is the next step:

 

I used white lining paper, just pasting it all the way left to right, folding over the cardboard chimney breast. The grooves resulted in creases, and there isn't much I can do about them now except hide them behind rails or wall hangings. I used 1:1 scale embossed wallpaper for ceiling. I also used stripy embossed wallpaper - that I have used for a variety of purposes - to make front mouldings that very neatly hid the uneven edges. I am very happy with this solution.

I made the period fireplace the day before yesterday. It is a House of Miniatures kit, but it so happened that I had a firebox that came with some ebay lot a long time ago and didn't fit any fireplaces. I am glad I remembered it because it is just right here, isn't it?

I guess I could leave the floor as it is, but it doesn't look quite natural, and I want to try yet another floor pattern. (If you haven't seen my magnificent floors, use the tag "floor" on the right). I have a remnant of an old parquet floor that I could recycle, or maybe I will make something entirely new. It isn't a very large area, like in a house, so it can be something really challenging.

I am considering all kinds of panelling, railing and moulding, and I have already spent some time on the web searching for ideas. Meanwhile, I have made a "sketch", borrowing objects from Womble Hall, just to see what it might look like.

Come back soon.

Step by step: upper corridor

The closest predecessor to the upper corridor in Womble Hall is the staircase in the old Victorian house, rebuilt in the cabinet. To have or not to have stairs in a dollhouse is a matter of taste. Stairs unquestionably take a lot of space, but they do add a more natural look, and they are fun to make (to a certain degree - there is a lot of pain as well).

This is what the corridor looks like today: 

   

The general design of the house suggested stairs in the right-hand side of the middle room on the upper floor. My initial thought was to ignore the partition that created two very small rooms and just have one large hall with stairs on one side. There were several reasons to abandon this plan. The whole design would have been much too symmetrical: three similar rooms on three floors. The central partition created variation. I also needed the left-side small room for the bathroom. I could have done the opposite: keep the partition and get rid of stairs, but what would I then have in the right-side small room? It has two doors, and doors also take a lot of space. A corridor anyway? Then I could just as well have stairs.

It took ages before I did anything at all in this room. In the early shell, I didn't have any furniture. I couldn't decide on the wallpaper or floor, and in any case I needed to make the rear corridor first.

It was not until December 2014 that I took the first step and made the floor.

 

It was really, as I say in the linked blog post, a side effect of looking for floor patterns for the other rooms, but at least there was some progress. In this picture, the wallpaper is just leaned onto the wall, the stairs are attached with tack, and the door is not inserted properly. At this stage, the shell wasn't glued yet, and as I mentioned, I had to finish the rear corridor first.

I didn't plan to have any particular ceiling in the corridor so when I was painting and decorating ceilings on flat surfaces, I just left this bit plain white.

When I assembled the house, the back and central partitions were not inserted so what you could see was the back wall of the rear corridor. Nobody would even guess that there would be two more rooms there.

It took a couple of months before I started getting closer, and in pictures from rear corridor trials you can see that I had decided on the wallpaper, which is thick craft paper, with probably too large pattern, but I thought - and still think - it fits well. In this picture, obviously, the stairs aren't there, and you can see a hole in the ceiling where it would eventually be inserted. Paradoxically, without stairs, the room looks very small.

 

Then finally it was time to deal with the stairs. Read the linked blog post carefully, because it is yet another example of how you gradually become more demanding, not satisfied with easy solutions. After a lot of effort I was pleased, and I still am.

 

As with the grand stairs, I could have used individual spindles - but it will have to wait. I added moulding and a rail on the wall which weren't included. And this was it, apart from Adam ceiling, which I think gave the corridor a really grand look.

 

Since then, I have - temporarily - put the magnificent breakfront in the corridor, and as there is no other place for it in the house, I guess it's staying there.The only problem is that it is so big that nothing can be put further along the wall, and I am running short of space.

Step by step: bathroom

Bathrooms are very interesting to make, just like kitchens, because there are many tiny details that you can add more and more of.

This is what the bathroom in Womble Hall looks like at the moment. It is on the upper floor, next to the master bedroom. There isn't a direct door from the bedroom to the bathroom, but you must go through a corridor. Maybe it's not correct, but there wasn't any other natural place for the bathroom.

 

The very first bathroom I made was in my old Victorian house in a bookshelf, which I keep referring to. I still have the bathtub, and I keep changing my mind between it and the current sugar-bowl with lion feet (you can see a glimpse of it in the picture).

In the next step, I added a washbasin and other stuff. I was a beginner then and didn't know what materials and tools to use, but I had fun. As you see, the tiles have found their way into Womble Hall after all these years.

When I moved the house into a cabinet, I kept the bathroom, but it became very small. Yet the concept is the same, and has remained so.

When I started planning Womble Hall I wasn't sure where the bathroom would go. I first thought in the attic, but it would be very uncomfortable for people in the bedroom if they had to run upstairs in the middle of the night. I also considered the large right-hand room on the upper floor, that eventually become the study.

But already on the very first picture of the shell, long before it was glued, you can see the bathroom in its current place.



I made the first attempts decorating the bathroom early in the project, precisely because I simply copied it from the previous house. Maybe it was my lack of imagination, but I really liked the old bathroom, and even though not a lot has survived, the general sense has. As I explain in that early blog post, I have seen pictures of bathrooms in people's dollhouses where they have just pasted the whole sheet of tiles on the wall, and it doesn't look natural. So here I pasted the tiny tiles one by one. Yes, it did take some time. But I am never in a hurry with my mini projects. The floor is also a commercial sheet that I bought very early in my mini-making days, today I would have made in myself. But the sheet was not large enough, so the back part of it is a photocopy. Can you tell?

In the picture below you see a door in the back wall. Behind the door is a corridor, and in the next picture you can see what I made there.

 

As with all other rooms, it took a long time before I could make any final arrangements. In this case particularly, I had to finish the rear corridor (which I will show in due time), but as soon as that was done, the basic work on the bathroom was done as well.

After that, I added some objects, and the final touch came with Adam ceilings.

Since then, I made the Chippendale dressing table and two small tables - you cannot have too many tables in a Victorian house. I may add another mirror over the dressing table, and the hooks keep falling off, as you see, I must fix them better.I also want to make a proper Victorian water cistern over the toilet. Once again, a project is never ever finished.

Step by step: upper hall

Like the grand entrance hall I described yesterday, upper hall has no predecessors in any earlier projects, and, also like the grand hall, I had no other options than to build it as designed. (I guess I could have closed the stairwell and make a different room, but then the grand staircase would not lead anywhere, and that wouldn't make sense).

This is the most recent view:



Similarly to the grand hall, it took me a long time to plan, and, for instance, I knew that I needed to finish the floors before I could attach the railings.

I knew from the beginning that the hall would be yellow, so when I tentatively painted the back of the house, the back wall of the hall was yellow and has remained so.

 

This is the first picture of the hall - the shell not glued yet, and it stayed the same for a very long time. I put some objects in so that  it didn't feel totally empty - as I did with all other rooms, but at this point I didn't know at all what else might be here. I made a chandelier to hang over the stairwell, but it was too heavy to attach with tack, and it would be some time before I could attach it permanently.

During the Christmas party in 2014, that I have referred to several times, the hall looks just as three months earlier, but my guests didn't notice that there were no floors nor railings. Just tells you how much people pay attention.




I thought I would have long vertical panels on the back wall that I cut from old postcards, but then I found a set of magnets in a museum shop. This was still before I glued the shell.

When I finally did glue the shell, I was busy making floors and hanging wallpaper, and anyway, I didn't quite know yet what I wanted to do with the hall. I would put in some objects and then move them away as they found their place elsewhere. It wasn't until April 2015 that I finally decorated the ceiling as I had planned for a while and attached the chandelier, but only because I was sealing off the rear corridor from the floor of which the chandelier was to hang.

At some point I must have inserted the window, but not registered it. It is a slightly stupid window because as my house stands by the wall, there is no view and not even any light coming in,although I have ideas about what to do with it.

In the pictures from late November 2015, when my son-in-law made lights, you can still see that the upper hall is a mess.





No floors, no railings, and even the doors are not inserted yet. But all other rooms were sort of finished, so it was high time to deal with the hall.

I finished the floor, which was a laborious task, but truly rewarding.

 

I say it in the linked blog post, but I will say it again: I estimate that it took me 50 hours to make this floor. Talk patience!

Then I finally tackled the small back stairs and the railings, and if you have ever made railings you know that they just won't stay. Again, I could have discarded the railings that came with the kit and built my own with individual spindles, but this will be in my next life.

 

Looking back at the process, like this, makes me realise again how much time and effort lies behind every part of this project. I am glad I have documented it in detail, for instance, finally inserting doors,  adding mouldings and making the Adam ceiling.

And that's it, really. All that has changed - or has been constantly changing - is new Chippendale chests and side tables moving in and out.



There is only so much you can have even in a Victorian room, so I am not sure what else may happen here. It is doubtless a very grand room and probably the first you see because it is exactly at eye level. I am pleased that it has turned out so well.

Staging for visitors

In two weeks I am giving my traditional Christmas party, and I anticipate that my guests will want to see my dollhouse. For a number of reasons, I didn't have this party last year, so the last my guests will have seen is this, two years ago:


The shell is not glued yet, there is no back, nor roof nor fronts, the doors and windows are not properly inserted, the stairs are leaned-to, the wallpaper is white-tacked, and most floors are simply covered with paper.

Yet my guests thought it was the most wonderful dollhouse they had seen.

Maybe they hadn't seen many. Or simply weren't looking closely.

If you don't look closely it does look cute. Small cute rooms full of small cure furniture and objects and dolls.


But this time, even if for my guests it may look the same, most of the superficial work is done. There will be plenty of things for them to admire, things I am proud of. Floors, stair railings, back corridor lights, flickering fireplaces, Adam ceilings, pleated curtains. Some may pay attention to the Chippendale furniture. Some may notice various details. Some will count cats.

Some will ask me how I made this or that. Most won't.

In anticipation of this visit I must make sure that everything is as much as it should be. That all pictures hang straight. That candles in chandeliers don't fall off. That all tiny objects on tables and chests are there, not lying on the floor around. That books are neat in bookcases (except those deliberately spread on the floor). That the door knobs haven't fallen off. That pots and pans and jars in kitchens and larders are stored away or arranged in an interesting disorder. That all dolls are upright, except those asleep in their beds.

That there is no ball of white tack in front of the grand stairs. Nor full-size tools left somewhere.

That lights work. That fronts still close and open (I must put in magnets!). That all unfinished spots I once left for later are finished.

Preferably, I should make five more sets of curtains, but I doubt I will have time. I may re-arrange the furniture and hang some more pictures.

The more I look at my house the more glad I am that I didn't postpone it until retirement.

Step by step: master bedroom

This room has a long history. If you have seen the reception room, music room, drawing room and dining room you know that I trace the origin of every room in Womble Hall back to my first dollhouse. The four-poster bed was the very first piece of furniture I made when I started my dollhouse hobby, almost nine years ago. I built the bedroom around this bed.

Then we moved to England, and I rebuilt the house in a cabinet. The new bedroom was on the upper floor, alongside bathroom and hall. So this is probably the starting point for the current bedroom:

 

When I started planning Womble Hall I knew that the bedroom would be on the top floor to the left. I have no idea why it had to be so, but once I had decided, I haven't changed any room.

 

You can see that on the whole the bedroom is just like it was in the old house. It is quite a straightforward room, except that it has a door in the far right corner, leading to the rear corridor. But it would take a long time to get that far. However, because the concept of the room was clear from the beginning, I put it off for quite a while. No chimney breasts, no complicated partitions. So it was not until October 2014 that I made floors for the bedroom.



Let me remind you that the shell wasn't glued yet at that points. The floor is mounted on card, and thus easily removable, and the wallpaper is white-tacked. But the bedroom starts taking shape.

I didn't return to this room until I had assembled the shell and started putting in floor dividers, when I also decorated the ceilings. By that time, the wallpaper and wall panels had been added. The rear corridor is done, with battery lights fixed so that the light comes into the bedroom through the open door. The door itself took a long time because it didn't fit and I had to sand the opening for ages. It wasn't easy to do it inside the room, in a corner.

 

Apart from adding new furniture, I haven't done much in this room. I have obviously added mouldings: wooden skirting and paper cornices.  The furniture I made for this room includes a new dressing table, a new wardrobe, and a cradle.



In this picture, I have removed some objects and both dolls to display the new furniture better. This is a problem with crammed Victorian rooms: in the end, you cannot see every detail.

 

This room is as finished as it can be. It has display lights, like all other rooms, hidden behind a front cornice, and the light from the door adds to the atmosphere. I will probably replace the white table and chairs, and I may add more pictures, but there is really not much space left. If you compare this picture with the first one in this post you may think that not much has changed. Look again.

Step by step: dining room

This will be a long story. The reception room, music room and drawing room were relatively easy. But the dining room has some advanced features - one of many that make this house so interesting - that not only demanded careful planning, but also led to a number of major mistakes. Hopefully this will be all the more exciting to follow.

The main idea of the dining room goes back to my Georgian house, which was made to display the Chippendale furniture. So the centerpiece of the room was the Hepplewhite dining table:

 

In the early picture of Womble Hall, you can see the future dining room to the right on the middle floor.

You can also see that the room has a back corridor. According to the instructions, there should be a staircase in this corridor, but no matter how I tried, the staircase wasn't visible if you put in the partition, whether with the door on the right or on the left. I have seen a version of this house with no partition and the staircase against the back wall. But I liked the corridor so much that I sacrificed the stairs in favour of the corridor. By this, I also chose to make my life difficult. But this would be a long time in the future.

If you have read my previous posts you would not be surprised to know that I started the room with a chimney breast. It was the first chimney breast I made from scratch, and I was and still am very pleased with it. I used low-resolution printed wallpaper just to test it, and I also placed some objects in the room to see what it might look like.

In this picture from September 2014, I had inserted the partition, but there is no back wall behind it. The door is a plastic door from another project, just to test. And the floor is paper, the same as in the old Georgian house.

I did some work on other rooms before the basement arrived, and then I spent many weeks on the basement. So it wasn't until late December that I returned to the dining room and then had to start planning carefully. For instance, at this stage I had to decorate the rear corridor. And of course I had to use proper wallpaper, and although the initial trial was only temporary, I actually liked it. So the result was this:

The doors aren't properly inserted yet, but I had to fix the rear door pretty soon since it had to be finished before I put the partition in place. Which wouldn't happen for a while. But just to make it look nice, I white-tacked wallpaper on the right-hand wall and added some objects.

In this picture, you can see that I have a chest in the rear corridor, and there is a light there (battery LED light). The floor is temporarily borrowed from another room. You may ask why I kept moving floors from room to room, but it was to see the effect. Compare this picture with the previous one, with bare floors. You cannot really judge whether the decoration works.

Note that the shell is not assembled yet. It means that the wallpaper is not glued in the corners, and generally everything is shaky.

In the picture of the half-assembled shell, in March 2015, you can see how I had hung wallpaper with flaps that would later go on the back partition. And you can see the wallpapered back wall of which only a little bit will be visible through the door in the partition.

Next I had to insert the floor partitions, so I wanted to decorate ceilings on flat surfaces. This was the ceiling for the dining room. Two months later, it fell down.



This picture, from May 2015, shows the partition without the chimney breast. I would soon attach it permanently to the partition. The rear corridor is sealed off and can only be reached through the door, which turned out to be a problem. I believe this was the most difficult room in the whole house, where I also made the most mistakes. But the happy ending was this:

The partition in place, the rear door in place, wallpaper in place, ceiling successfully repaired. Time to make the floor!



It all sounds very easy, but remember, there are hours and hours of work between the pictures. This floor took a very long time to make.

But after that, I didn't do much on this room, apart from adding some more furniture, until we did the lights, and I have a nice picture taken through the side window:

 Then I made a new ceiling, as I did with all other rooms:

I added skirting boards (proper) and coving, made from 1:1 wallpaper.

We are now in December 2015. New Year dinner is served. You can also see new curtains on the window.



Since then I have mostly added new Chippendale furniture. For instance, I replaced all chairs and the side table, made a cellarette, a dumb waiter, a serving table, and another serving table. I had to put the side table elsewhere, and it still looks crowded.

I will probably add some pictures on the walls, possibly sconces on both sides of the mirror, but there is not much else I can squeeze in this room. I will make more food. I also need to repair the male Dutch doll to keep his female friend company.

Step by step: music room

Apparently, my step-by-step blog post was appreciated, so I now continue with the next room, the music room, which is opposite from the reception room on the same floor.

When I was planning the house I knew that I would have a grand reception room and a ladies' drawing room, but I wasn't quite sure what I would do in this room. The reception room was new, the drawing room had some features from the old Victorian drawing room, but I also had a Chippendale sofa and armchair, and I wanted to build a room around them. Simply another reception room, to begin with.

I had absolutely no idea for decoration or flooring. But I happened to buy a fireplace front - just couldn't resist it, and to a certain degree it determined the rest of the room. I made dark wall panels (the blog post describes how I made them) and a proper chimney breast.

 

This picture is from mid-September 2014. The shell is not glued yet, and won't be for quite a while. At this stage I didn't use real wallpaper, but a low-resolution copy, just to test the effect. I wasn't at all sure that it was the right wallpaper, but I had it in my Georgian house where the sofa and the armchair were. I wasn't committed to it. The paper is white-tacked. The floor on the right is also a low-resolution printout.

I didn't make any progress on this room for a long time, mostly because I was working on the basement, but also because I could not decide on decoration. I browsed dozens of Victorian wallpapers, and nothing matched the fireplace and the dark panels. It wasn't until mid-January that I made a ceiling for this room, still not knowing what the walls will be like.

I worked as long as possible on flat surfaces, so when I finally chose the wallpaper I first decorated the side wall:

 

As you see, the windows are not properly inserted yet.

Then I decorated the opposite wall, and again, the door is not inserted. It wouldn't be inserted until all floors were done.

 

In mid-March 2015, I glued the shell, and here you can see the back wall of the room, with the chimney breast:

In April I got an incredible bargain at a flea market, including a piano and a doll that immediately went into the music room.

 

The window is still not inserted. The herringbone parquet had moved from the reception room to this room. I kept moving it around and frequently moved it into the room I happened to be working on, just to see the effect. The violin with case came with an ebay lot.

I added some furniture to this room, but it wasn't until next October I returned to it, to discover that I had left it totally unfinished. Apparently it looked okay, but in fact the wallpaper and the panels were not properly attached.

After some hard work the room looked like this:





There were some finishing touches left, for instance, curtains:





But on the whole, the room hasn't changed much. I have added a harp and some Chippendale furniture. There is a flickering fire in the fireplace, a tea light in the chandelier and display lights hidden behind mouldings. The coving on the right doesn't look neat (yet) because there is a wire switch in the corner.



I like this room. I may add more paintings and ornaments, but otherwise there isn't much I can do. It is as crammed as a Victorian room should be.