Door knobs

Apart from an infinite number of windows, my house has nineteen interior doors. Doors are not really necessary in a dollhouse, and they take a lot of space, but they certainly add to the natural look. In theory, your dolls should be able to walk from any room to any other room.

Doors are almost as boring to paint as windows, but you can so some interesting thing with them. Some of mine will be stained rather than painted (or so I think at the moment). Some may be other that white. I have distressed the four doors in the basement by painting a thin layer of green on top of the white and wiping it off immediately with a cloth.

To look natural, doors need door knobs. I am not going to pay a fortune for door knobs from dollhouse suppliers, and I have already tested some intresting methods in my previous projects. I had a vague idea what I wanted for the basement doors, and as I rummaged in my nail och screw cabinet, I saw a perfect solution.

I found these brass screws that I have no idea where they come from (and that possibly cost more than dollhouse door knobs). I bit off the top of the screw, drilled a hole in the door and fixed two knobs on each side. This is what it looks like in its environment - the door frame still unpainted.

I will have the same door knobs for all doors in the basement, but I have many other ideas for door knobs that I will implement. Luckily, there are so many doors in the house!

Moving on

I wasn't quite honest when I said in my previous post that deviations were merely rewards for doing boring tasks. It is, as all teachers know, a better strategy to vary tasks so you don't get really bored and frustrated. But another reason is that I want to see some progress, something that I can proudly display and share. Yet another white wall or yet another set of window surrpounds doesn't feel much of a progress or something to share. But a front wall like this one is:

 

Therefore I have made this front even though it will take some time before I can put it in. It fact, this is the last (!) of the thirty five windows (except for dormer windows which will probably not happen until next summer so I won't worry now).


This morning I dismantled the basement for the fifth time.

 

The reason is that I feel I am getting closer to the final assemblage and glueing. But before I do that I need to finish all work on flat surfaces.

When I started this project, I consulted my facebook groups concerning the principal technique: glue first and then decorate or decorate before glueing. Not suprisingly, opinions differed, and both sides offered persuasive arguments. I followed my instinct, and I guess I will soon know why I was wrong when all my decorating gets damaged during assembly. But having done some other projects I know how much easier it is to work on flat surfaces. Imagine doing this inside the limited space of an assembled room:

 

Of course you can ask why I am doing this in the first place. This is a meticulous task - yes, I am cutting the 0.5x0.5 cm tiles one by one and pasting them on one by one in a diamond pattern. It takes ages. I could have left the walls white. I could have bought a border. But I enjoy the process as much as the result. (I used to do throwing, and although the results were mostly pathetic I enjoyed doing it immensely). And the result is unique. I promise: there will be no kitchen like this in any dollhouse ever. Unless, of course, somebody copycats me. But then, I have aged the walls with tea, and no one can copy that shade exactly.

There are some things left to do before I can start. I need to fix door frames, again because it's easier to do on separate panels. It means that I need to fix the door knobs first. To see how I am doing it, please read the next post.

Front door

Another small project I have done as a distraction from the neverending window painting is the front door. I have bought this outrageously expensive front door, and I wanted to do it right. I had a vague idea that I wanted the door to be dark oak, but the problem with oak stain is that once you have applied it it's almost impossible to change, and I couldn't afford to make a mistake.

As usually in these cases, I consulted my facebook groups. As sociologists know, the answers you get depend on the questions you ask. I asked: What colour do you think the doot should be, white or dark or dark with white surrounds?

 

Guess how many different answers I got? Most voted for white, but there were many great suggestions, and many pictures. Interestingly enough, there were different trends in different groups. Can it be culturally dependent?  Anyway, I wasn't wiser after that, but then one clever person said: Why don't you cut mock doors from cardboard and test different colours? Now, that's what facebook groups are for!

I cut a very crude white surround and painted three different doors. I made a green one because there was a very strong opinion on green.

 

I now worded my question differently: Which of these doors do you like best? This time nobody voted for white! Isn't it curious? You really need to see it before you can decide. So I dismissed white, and since I wanted the door dark oak from the beginning I made it dark oak. It took five coats of stain to make it this dark, and then I gave it a coat of varnish.

 

The door handles are pieces of junk jewellery, and the knocker is a bit of an earring.

Now you may ask why I am making these finishing touches when it will be months before I get anywhere near. The answer is: a reward for painting windows.

More floors

This is not the most exciting project, but when I get bored to death of painting windows, I do something else that will need to be done one day. I made another floor with the same technique I have used before, but with a lighter sheet:

It took two or three evenings. I mention this because it looks very easy when it's done, but it does take the time it takes, and you cannot cheat.

With the furniture - but still without wallpaper or even the back wall - it looks like this:

 

If you haven't seen my blog before, here is how I made the canopy bed, the nightstand, the chest and the portable heater.  The oriental rug is cut from a souvenir purse someone gave me. The washstand is from a flee market, but I made the porcelain in my ceramic class.

A proprietor's concerns

As far as I understand, I am the only owner of this property in the UK and apparently in the whole world. (If someone who reads this owns the new model of Downton Manor, please please contact me). It is of course exciting, but the down side is that there is no one I can ask for advice. Not even the manufacturer because somebody else is assembling the model for them, but they haven't done it yet, therefore there are still, three months after I received the kit, no assembly instructions, and if something is profoundly wrong, which I every now and then suspect, nobody yet knows. Perhaps I should have... but it's pointless to speculate. Here I am, with a tremendously expensive toy that I so far don't quite know how to put together, and if there is another owner (please, please contact me!) we are making our mistakes on our own. The problem is, I don't even know if I am making mistakes. I don't even know whether I have all the parts I am supposed to have.

But I have invested so much in this property. Emotionally of course, all that time I was waiting, against hope, that it would eventually arrive, and now putting all my effort into it, neglecting all other projects for a long time to come. Intellectually, too, because there are so many decisions to make, so many problems to solve, so many ideas to test and dismiss. If I finish it at all some time - I estimate it will take at least a year - people might look at pictures, or the house itself, and say whatever people say in such cases ("Crazy old woman", "How nice", "Wow"), but nobody will know how much is behind the final outcome.

And I am not even mentioning the pecuniar investment. I keep track of all costs involved: paint, tools, spares. I got interior doors for my patience, otherwise they are extra. I didn't get interior doors for the basement so I will have to buy these. I got one double door that was supposed to be the main entrance door, but the package said "Interior door". I need two interior double doors so I tried to find them, first on ebay (no luck), then everywhere else (no luck). I asked the manufacturer who pointed me toward the only place in the UK who sells these door at outrageous price. Or maybe not outrageous. But while I can make all kinds of things from rubbish, I cannot make double doors, Or maybe I could. However, I ordered these doors, adding a substantial chunk to my building budget. it will be interesting to see how much the final project will have cost, again, given that I buy the absolute minimum.

Why am I doing it, you may ask? Sometimes I am asking myself. Initially I meant it to be my retirement project. I hope by the time I retire this project is finished, and then I will have to come up with something else. 

Secret corridors

This is what my basement looked like this morning.

 

No, there hadn't been an earthquake in Cambridgeshire, but I had taken out back and side walls to paint them. After I had made the marble kitchen floor it was clear that the walls in the best kitchen should be light and unpatterned, and white is the easiest solution. I also wanted to paint the rear corridor which is a bizarre room in the new model of this house. It has side doors from both kitchens and from the entrance hall, and I am not quite sure what the designer had in mind. But I decided I would put in a fake staircase. I obviously cannot make a real staircase because I then would need to cut a stairwell though both the basement roof and the main building's base, and I do not have the skills. But a fake staircase that pretends to lead to a similar rear corridor on the ground floor, this makes sense.

I had been postponing the staircase project because I didn't have the right stain, but yesterday it arrived, just in time for my Friday evening playtime. I had thought that stain would work like sealer, but it didn't. The effing MDF absorbed it all, leaving an untidy, fluffy surface. I checked how my model miniaturist did it, and it felt better to see that she didn't manage it either. But I wasn't prepared to go to the extremes she went to. In such cases, I consult my Facebook groups, and while I was considering all the good advice they gave me, my eyes fell on the roll of self-adhesive shelf sheet which I had bought to make more floors. It was worth a try, and I was quite pleased with the result.

 

This is not the secret staircase, I just put it into the main house to take a picture. But I was so pleased with the result that I also tried the main staircase.

It needs to be trimmed, but I believe it will work, and I won't have to stain and sand and stain and sand and stain...

This took care of my Friday evening playtime, but today, after I had painted the walls and re-assembled the shell - still not gluing it - I put in the stairs to see what it would be like with the painted back wall.

Of course I haven't put back the wallpaper, and the floor isn't finished, but you can see the idea. And as I was watching it I became less and less happy with it. Suddenly the stairs felt too large for the space. And I also realised that in my basement planning I had completely forgotten the wonderful secret door I had in the old Victorian house, the back of an antique photo frame. It would lead from the corridor further down into the (non-existing) cellar.

It creates the same sense of mystery as the stairs, but doesn't take too much space.

While I was at it I also tried to put in a mirror.

 

Mirrors expand space and create great effects that I have utilised in my van Hoogstraaten room box.

But at the moment I am not sure what I will do. Apart from the view through this door, the corridor, when the basement is finished, will only be visible from side windows, through another door.

It has some potential, but I need to think further. The corridor has to be completed, including lights, before I put on the roof, because there will be no access to it.

Marble tile floor

I found a self-adhesive marble sheet in a thrift store. Great to make kitchen floors.

However, as I have already noticed, you cannot just use a shelf sheet for flooring because the pattern is too large, and it looks unnatural. I wouldn't have minded six years ago, but I do now.

What I did was cut the sheet into 1,5x1,5 cm squares - it was easy, because there is a grid on the back. Then I glued them one by one in a diamond pattern onto an old folder (somebody at my work cleaned their office and threw away dozens of folders. I picked them up, and I now have card in all colours to last me for years).

 Yes, it took me two whole evenings. But it was worth it.

 

The floor will go into the best kitchen. I think it looks great, but because it is so colourful I believe the walls will have to be white.