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.