Plumbing

Today I finished plumbing.

 

Let me remind you that the drain pipes - which are of course drinking straws - conceal electric wires connecting the floors into a single LED strip. I am very proud of this solution. The alternative would be simply to have wires held by cable clips. Not very realistic. Here the pipes are probably not hugely decorative, but at least they look plausible. Just a couple are held by cable clips - these proved to be clumsy, hard to get into the walls, and when they did get through there would be a couple of millimetres of nail on the inside. Instead I used duct tape, almost deliberately cutting it uneven. Some places are where the wires go in and out, others just hold the pipe in place.

With this, I believe that the major exterior features of the house are complete!

As a contrast, look where I was a year ago.

Roof holders

A simple project, which is a temporary solution until I make something more permanent.

I took two lengths of dowel and added furniture protection pads on both sides.

When not in use, the holders can be hidden behind the railing.

Tudor illumination, continued

As planned, I went on to make display lights in the Tudor house. Once again, the purpose of display lights is to illuminate the scene, regardless of what kind of lights would be used in the period you are re-creating. You can add what filmmakers call realistic lights, including fake lamps and chandeliers, or electric lights, but display lights allow the viewer to see details that wouldn't be visible in "authentic" light. For instance, if you have been to Museum of Childhood in London, where they have a huge collection of dollhouses, some have realistic lights, some don't, but all have display lights.

As I mentioned in the previous post, I had some issues with battery holders because they are hard to hide. In the solar, I did as I had planned: made a slit in the roof and led the battery into the attic. At the moment it is just there, but I will disguise it as a chest.



The LED strip is attached behind the front beam, and although it looks far too bright in the picture, it is a soft and even light, and you can see well into the room.

For the great hall, on the middle floor, I had several options. I could lead the battery outside and attach it to the wall, disguising it as something. I would have to make a slit in a cross-beam. I didn't much fancy it. I considered hiding the battery behind the stairs of the room above. It would fit, but I have tried several ideas about how to attach it, and it didn't work. So finally - or perhaps temporarily until I find a better solution - I simply hid it behind a beam, which I initially didn't want to do because it would be too conspicuous. However - can you see it?


Of course you cannot see it because I have cropped the picture. If you look very carefully, you can see a bit of it under the second beam, on the left. Believe me, it's not bad at all. (I may change my mind tomorrow).

I did  the same in the kitchen, and because it's below eye-level, you cannot see it at all, unless you look from below, and why would you?



Now you can see all the details at the back of the kitchen: the inglenook, the utensils, the hanging meats; and it doesn't matter that there were no LED lights in the Tudor era because there are no realistic lights (except candles and oil lamps), only display lights.

If you are curious about how furniture and other objects are made, search my blog with the tag "Tudor". 

Tudor illumination

This weekend I have traveled three hundred years back in time from my Victorian house to my Tudor house. If you want to see my Tudor house you will need to travel four years back in time of my blog, to the post when I last did some major work on it, and move backwards, to the day my husband brought home the shell he found at a recycling station. In between, you can read about how I decorated the house, added timber, made an inglenook and many other details. I have done some more work on the house since then, mostly adding objects I found at flea markets; but largely the Tudor house has been neglected, obscured by its more splendid Victorian neighbour.

The reason I went back to Tudor is that I want to install display lights. A dilemma with period houses is that you cannot have electricity in older houses, but you may still want some lights to show the details inside. The Tudor house is deep, and you cannot see very well even by daylight. I am with Brian Long, the author of The Authentic Tudor and Stuart Dolls' House, who says that even though there would of course be no electricity in a Tudor house it is still legitimate to have display lights. And in a Tudor house it is easy to hide display lights behind beams.

So I thought.

I bought 10cm LED strips with batteries and planned to attach the strips behind beams and hide the battery holders somewhere. The somewhere proved to be problematic. The holders are larger than you think, and they are very conspicuous in a miniature environment. I have several solutions. In the solar - which is the upper floor with the great bed - I can drill a hole behind the beam and hide the battery in the attic. I can disguise it as a treasure chest. On the ground and first floors, I can let the batteries sit on the outside. It won't be tremendously decorative, but it might work. I can also hide them behind stairs, but so far I haven't figured out how to attach them. I will sleep on it and go on tomorrow.

But while I was at it, I removed all objects from the house and dusted them, and also dusted floors and stairs and inspected all things that needed attention. For instance, last time I worked on this house, I inserted window panes in the solar, but never fixed them properly. Now was the right moment.

The original shell just had openings, but I added "leaded" window panes made from bottle protection mesh (the kind you get at taxfree shops in airports) which I glued onto a piece of old plastic folder. Looking at it now, I wonder how I could ever think that it was satisfactory. But I have had so much practice since then. So now I added a window frame, properly mitred, to match the timbers.

This looks so much neater. And from the outside, it looks like this:

I also hinged the back shutter in the kitchen that I had been postponing ever since, because it was such an awkward space to work in. But now I had no excuses, so I fixed that. And I mended the front door that had been broken from start. Now it can be opened and closed properly. This is what the kitchen will be like, with light (the battery holder just outside the picture edge, to the right.

Hopefully, tomorrow I will finish all the lights and have something to show. Come back!

Major corrections

If you have followed my building of the front stairs you may have noticed that the right front has been open on all pictures. The reason is it won't close, and I know why.

As I wrote in a post, when you have completed a PhD you can be passed without corrections (which almost never happens), or with minor corrections that won't take more than a couple of months and frequently just a couple of days. Or you can get major corrections which means that you have really messed it up, but your examiners believe that if you work hard enough you can still get it right.

"The time has come" to do some major corrections so that the right front closes properly. The reason it doesn't close properly is that almost a year ago, when I glued the shell, I was lazy, sloppy - and quite desperate. I dismissed a couple of millimeters of horizontal panels. This was because after hours of sanding I had managed to almost fit in the panels, and at the moment a couple of millimeters didn't seem significant. I did test to hinge the fronts and close them, and it worked. I have pictures to prove it. Actually, as I look at those pictures the fronts do not close properly, but there were so many other details that weren't finished that it didn't bother me. More important, even if I had wished to take out the panels, I wouldn't have been able to do so. In hindsight, I should have asked for assistance.

When P and I made the lights, we noticed that some floors/ceilings were skewed, and we aligned the angle bars with the side walls, with the understanding that some time in the future the horizontal panels would have to be fixed. The future is here.

I won't bore you with details, but the amount of work I have put into this ungrateful task has made me consider investing in a set of more powerful tools, such as a dremel. It would have made it much easier and maybe even pleasurable. As it is, I used what I had, and I am not quite pleased with the result, but the front can be closed now.

While I was at it, I covered some holes and seams with filler and painted edges. As I progress, I notice that some edges that I once very carefully painted gray must be repainted white, and the other way round. I have even discovered two completely unpainted edges that I haven't seen before.

None of these tiny details will be perfect, and the question is whether anyone will ever notice and whether I should be upset.

The closer I come to completion - if there ever is such a thing with a dollhouse - the less satisfied I am with untidiness, however small; with tiny flaws, regardless of whether they are my fault (mostly they are); with things too late to change.

Maybe I shouldn't worry too much. After all, I am doing it for fun. 

Front stairs, part 2

Last weekend I very deliberately avoided moving any further with front stairs because I couldn't stand more frustration. I wish somebody shares their experience of building front stairs because I just cannot imagine how this can be done. I stopped two weeks ago in high mood because I had managed to sand the banisters and glue them on, but when, the day after, I tried to glue the steps to the front arch they came off, and I realised there was no way they would stay glued because there was not enough surface to support them. This was the source of great distress, and that's why I kept myself busy with something else. However, I know that I need to finish it some day, and I just cannot admit that some pieces of MDF can totally defeat me as an intelligent human being. Therefore I gave up on instructions (insufficient anyway) and started thinking in my own way, based on the parts I had in front of me.

I needed something to hold the stairs and the front arch together, and ideally it would be small metal angle-bars, but I didn't have any and I didn't feel like going to ironmongers' just for that. I tried to make my own from sturdy tin foil, but it didn't work. So I decided to use square dowel.

 

I know it looks tremendously unprofessional, but nobody will ever see it, and it works!

The seams weren't neat, but I was going to cover them with skirting anyway. 

 

And then I faced the problem of the back arch. There was no way I could attach the back arch using the same technique - there was not enough space to work in. It wouldn't have stayed on if glued. It wouldn't fit precisely and would have to be cut and sanded in all eternity. Then suddenly it occurred to me that, with my new design, I could discard the back arch altogether. It seemed completely unnecessary; moreover, it obscured the lower entrance door (another miss from the manufacturer).

I hadn't noticed this before, probably because I was preoccupied with other issues. None of the available pictures show this detail. I now firmly believe that all pictures of assembled houses are photoshopped.

So off with the back arch!

I covered the seams with skirting, but I how had a problem with upper banister, and this is why I hadn't cut the skirting, which looks a bit weird. It had to be mitred, but I could not figure out the angle.

 

The upper banister needs to be flush with side banisters so that the rail can go over the upper edges of the side banisters. But the upper banister was half a centimeter higher than the side banister. Don't ask me why. Maybe another miss from manufacturer, maybe something I did wrong, but that was a fact.  Feeling rather terrified by my own boldness, I cut off 0.5 cm at the bottom of the upper banister. I did it bit by tiny bit with mitre shears because I knew I would never be able to saw it evenly.

The rest was so much cheating I am not even sure I want to share it. I had to trim the landing to fit between the stairs.

 

Then I had to mitre the skirting and the rail at irregular angles, covering my failures with filler. Again, it looks so straightforward when you look at finished pictures.

And yet, looking at the final result, I am quite pleased. There are small faults that are only visible on close inspection, and who will ever do that? I think back to my Christmas party over a year ago when everything was just held together with tack and masking tape, and people didn't notice. But I also think of someone who might one day look closely at every seam and say: "What kind of a sloppy person built this house!"

Chippendale three-drawer chest

As I was writing the previous post I realised that I had only shared my three-drawer chest project in a closed FB group, a group specifically dedicated to Chippendale furniture kits from the House of Miniatures. Browsing through other people's pictures, I noticed that some imaginative people used the kits for making something other than conventional mahogany pieces, stained and polished. I guess I had never even contemplated the option because I was in awe of these kits and couldn't conceive of them being used for anything other than their original purpose. Maybe because they are rather expensive (for instance, as compared to Poundland furniture that I have happily upcycled). But maybe just because I lacked imagination.

However, in my two recent bundles I have a number of duplicates, and I am not particularly interested in making the same thing twice. I thought I could make a piece and give it away or even give away a kit, but the idea of making something less conventional was liberating. So I started with a nightstand.

 

It is a very straightforward piece that I had made before, but this time I assembled it first and then painted antique white and aged by painting brown and immediately wiping off the paint. I used to have a different night stand in this room that I won't even show because it was completely wrong style. It has now found a good home.

A couple of weeks ago, my Chippendale group decided to run a weekend challenge: we would all do the same piece.  Well, not all, but some of us. We decided on a piece that many people were likely to have, a three-drawer chest. I had made it before, and I had a duplicate which I wanted to do something different with.

In the group, I showed everything step by step, but here I will just share the interesting features I made when painting and decorating. For instance, because I didn't stain the parts before assembling, I had to consider whether the chest itself should be painted on the inside, so I had to go and check my 1:1 antique chests, and they are all unpainted. Which makes sense, because paint was expensive so why waste it on surfaces that won't be visible. Likewise, the outside of the drawers is unpainted. But the inside of drawers is painted - in a colour different from the outside of the chest! Imagine, I open these chests several times a day, and I had never noticed that they were painted inside!

So I painted the inside of my drawers. (Yes, I use a chopping board as work surface. It is good because I can just lift it and move elsewhere when I need my desk for my regular work).

 
The chest itself, I painted antique white.  I had to do three coats before I was satisfied. This wood just soaks up paint, as opposed to stain.

However, I wasn't happy with this plain look, so I wanted to distress it, and more radically than I did with the night stand. I rubbed the surface with a candle, then painted with brown acrylic and immediately wiped it off with a cloth. You can see the difference on a drawer front where I tested it first: 

This sequence explains it better. First paint over, on a completely dry previous coat, rubbed with a candle. Then wipe. The result is a much more natural-looking surface. 

 

For knobs, I used bead caps. 

Here it is in its room, the servants' room. It looks old and worn out, just as I wanted. I am very pleased with it and I glad I experimented.