House restoration: reception room, drawing room, master bedroom

I am now moving to the left-hand side of the house, starting with the reception room (as you see, I am still avoiding the grand stairs).

There was no damage to it at all so I just put back all the furniture.

The only detail that needed attention was the chandelier.

 

To put it up, I needed to remove the floor from the room upstairs. I have done this several times when replacing lights, and I am always glad that I was clever and have all floors mounted on card, easy to remove.

Remaining in this room, mirror over the fireplace, and all the numerous paintings and ornaments. This is the only room in the house where cats are not allowed. (Why, I am suddenly asking myself. But I have never had a cat in this room, while I otherwise have cats everywhere).

Moving up one flight of stairs takes us to the ladies' drawing room, which is actually withdrawing room. I am not making it up, it's true. Ladies would withdraw after dinner, while gentlemen went to the smoking room.

It is in the drawing room I had to remove the floor to hang the chandelier in the reception room.

Like all floors, it will benefit from some sanding, which I will do later. At the moment I had a dilemma. In this room, I have a sofa and armchair that I made fifteen years ago among the very first pieces I made. I have attempted to replace them with "proper" furniture, but I just cannot. Too strong attachment. I won't even show a picture with a proper Chippendale sofa. So the old sofa and armchair stay.



This room has a magnificent antique mirror over the mantel, and there are more pictures, and of course there is tea served on several tables.

Finally, master bedroom. Again, not much to repair, except some mouldings that I didn't bother about at the moment, it's easily done at any point later.

Not much to add, so the dolls will be moving in soon.

The left-hand side of the house is restored with minimal effort.

Again, there is some work on the fronts, not least the double entrance door that is totally smashed. I hope I can repair it because it was quite expensive. But I am making rapid progress (avoiding the difficult parts).


To be continued.

Dealing with treasures, cont.

If you are curious about what I did with all the treasures I showed in my previous post, here are some reports.

I was right about the unusual chest of drawers: it looks great in the yarn shop. The old table was, like in so many projects, a temporary solution that just hanged on, until the right piece turns up. I have put some stuff in drawers.  The cash machine is probably slightly too big, but I don't think it matters. It looks much better than the old, modern one made from a printie.

Removing the glass and putting it back was easy, so my glazing solution works well. (You can see the before-image of the shop in the linked post).

Replacing the chandelier in the reception room was surprisingly painless. I didn't even have to remove the whole floor above, just lift it a bit. I think I did the same when I put up the current one. This is possible because I always assemble floors on card so they are relatively easy to remove or lift.

Since the new chandelier has a hanging hook rather than a ring, I thought about a new way of attaching it. Rather than using thin wine wire as before, I made a loop from champagne wire, put the ends through the hole and bent the ends. It is a stronger fixture; it looks both neater and more natural. The whole operation took me about five minutes. In case you wonder, the ceiling rose is made from a cheese box lid.

Obviously, I had to remove all objects from the drawing room above, and when I was putting them back I thought that the new clock would look nice on the chest. And more period-correct.

This is what happens: adding and replacing all the time. We do this in our 1:1 life as well, don't we?

I planned to move the chandelier from the reception room to the upper hall, but it proved next to impossible. The floor above is firmly attached, with a staircase glued on to it, so that would demand serious reconstruction I am not prepared for.

 

After trying the chandelier here and there, I have decided to replace the one in the music room. I am doing it reluctantly and with a strong sense of guilt because this chandelier was among the very, very first objects I made, more than ten years ago. I still like it and will use it in another project. But at the moment this feels the right thing to do.

Again, I didn't have to remove the whole floor, and I used my newly acquired technique, although this chandelier has a ring rather than hook. So this time I did the opposite: made a hook out of wire, ran it through the whole and bent, then hung the chandelier on it. This way, next time I want to change the light, I won't have to remove floors. Why haven't I thought about it before? Seems elementary now.

So the music room now looks like this (I see I need to adjust the candles - they keep falling off). 

Wait a minute, you are probably saying now, what about the master bedroom that was supposed to get one of those grand chandeliers to match the mirror? Ah, do you remember the two-arm chandelier I was planning to put into the working kitchen? It is now going into the master bedroom. The room above is nursery which doesn't even have a hardwood floor (reminder to improve this!) so it was as easy as it can be. And here we are. Yes, the ceiling rose is a yogurt lid. 

Full view of the room:

I am sooooo pleased with all these changes, not least because they turned out to be significantly less arduous than anticipated. And as I am looking at the rooms, it feels they have always been like this. A good sign.

I now have two nice lights to use somewhere else. I am sure I will think of the right place for them.

The outcome of this exercise is that I have discovered carefully suppressed flaws that need attention (not just the nursery floor), and I am looking forward to returning to Womble Hall after a long pause while I was occupied with other projects.

Come back soon.

French cottage style bedroom

I am getting bolder and bolder with my Chippendale kits and want to try different techniques and finishes. I have several kits for chest of drawers, that are mostly similar, and my large house doesn't have room for more chests, so I decided to make a chest that didn't fit into any of my projects. The chest itself wasn't particularly interesting to make, exactly because they are more or less the same. I won't show it step by step, but what I did was paint it with antique white acrylic and then add decoupage decoration. I had never made proper decoupage, and I am not quite sure I made it correctly, but I was very pleased with the result.

The drawers are not glued yes, because I always insert drawer handles before I glue on the fronts. The kits comes with standard handles and plates, but I didn't think they were suitable for this style. I wanted something like I have on my 1:1 chest, metal rings. I have plenty of these from junk jewellery, but they must be attached to the drawer in some manner, and it took me some time to figure it out. As usual, I was just rummaging through my supplies when the solution jumped at me. 

 

These champagne wires are among the best and most versatile materials. Easy to work with too.


 

When I shared this picture in my Facebook groups, one friend commented: "Yes, this is what I always do". And I thought I had invented something remarkable.

Anyway, this piece did not fit with anything, but I wanted to make something to go with it and made a bed. Again, I won't show how I made it step by step, because it is exactly like other Chippendale beds, with stringed bottom. Like the chest, I decoupaged the headboard before assembly. 

 

Making the mattress was again straightforward when you have made it several times, but I have always had issues with bedding because it won't stay. Then I remembered a trick I have seen either in some book or on the web. If you want a piece of fabric to stay, glue it to aluminium foil. In this case, I didn't even have to glue, I simply sewed it inside the blanket.

 

Now I could tuck it in neatly. Mind, I would never ever have this pink in my own bedroom. But this seemed appropriate. And the two pieces went nice together.

 

Now, however, I had a dilemma. I already have a shelf full of single miniatures that do not fit in any existing projects. I put the chest and bed tentatively in a cardboard box, but realised I would have to make the whole environment: floor, ceiling, wallpaper, and the box was too small, and a larger box would be too large... So I made a compromise.

 

This is my first corner vignette, and next time I will do it better. When I asked advice of my miniature friends, they suggested foam board, mdf and other stuff, but I am a recycler, I don't want to buy materials unless absolutely necessary, and also I wanted to make the scene then and there. The wallpaper is a printie from the web, and I made the floor quickly (relatively, maybe two hours) from self-adhesive shelf lining, cutting 4 cm strips and gluing them in a pattern. I used 1:1 embossed wallpaper for mouldings.

The dressing table and the chair are temporarily borrowed from a different project. I have another table kit and may make it in the same style, or perhaps it's not necessary. Maybe sometime I will develop this project in a whole room box or even a small holiday cottage, but at the moment the two pieces are nicely displayed.  

By the way, the tea service comes from a set of earrings an American friend has given me.

Step by step: guest bedroom

As promised in the previous post, I am resuming the grand tour of Womble Hall, including quarters normally omitted from tourist routes, but you, my dear reader, are privileged to see every corner.

I continue with the attic, where almost a year ago I stopped in the servant room. The right-hand door leads to guest bedroom. This is of course profoundly wrong because guests would not have to go through servant room, but this was the only solution other than skip guest bedroom altogether, and that I didn't want.

Unlike most rooms in Womble Hall, the guest bedroom does not go back to my first house in a bookcase. There was no space for two bedrooms, and I would probably not have a guest bedroom if I hadn't made the Chippendale bed. It went into my small Georgian house that I made entirely to display some Chippendale miniatures and that was then given away when I started Womble Hall. But I then had a dilemma, since I had two four-poster beds, one beautiful Chippendale and the old bed which was my very, very old miniature made almost exactly ten years ago. Of course I could not discard it, therefore I have two beds and two bedrooms. (A real house of this proportion would probably have ten bedrooms, but I pretend they are all in the back, behind rear corridors).

Anyway, when I started planning Womble Hall, I of course considered various options for where the guest bedroom could be, but given all other rooms I wanted there really wasn't another reasonable place, therefore in the earliest test, the guest bedroom is already where it is now. However, it took a long time before I got down to this room. I did test flooring just to have something rather than just bare primed surface, but I didn't do any further work on this room until many months later. If you haven't read my blog before: I decorated as much as possible on flat surfaces, before I assembled the shell. So the walls already had wallpaper - a printie - so all I needed to do was skirting. And as you see, the floor has changed.

About a year after I started, the attic was more or less finished.  Some months later we did the lights, and it made a huge difference. Then I added ceilings. And that's it.




What I haven't done in this room is hardwood floors. It is still paper, rather elaborate, but still paper. Eventually I will need to make proper floors because they look so much better. But this is exactly why a dollhouse project is never really finished.

I like this room, and I think the guests find it warm and cozy. Would you like to come and stay overnight in this room?

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.

Dower chest

I was looking forward to making this kit, and this weekend our group made it together. I wanted it to go into the guest bedroom where the bed, the chest of drawers, the night stand stand and the mirror have red mahogany finish so I used it again. About ten coats before I was satisfied. But I wanted the inside of the chest to be dark green, so it took some time to figure out which would be inside and which outside. I made one mistake and had to paint over the green with a dark brown paint and then stain on top of that. As it turned out, it was unnecessary because this bit was later covered with moulding.

I will not show step-by-step pictures, but just as with the cellarette I didn't trust myself with hinges and used ribbon to hold the lid.

 

I like the piece, and it fits nicely in the guest bedroom. I will have to fill it with bed linen.

Queen Anne wardrobe, part 2

Read the first part of the story here.

After leaving the project overnight with a really big problem I was reluctant to return to it in the morning.  I pretended that I didn't know anything about the doors and that I had intended all the time to start painting on the outside.

Now listen to this carefully: I keep making this mistake over and over again. I wanted the colour to be 18th-century white, which is white with just a tiny shade of blue. I mixed this colour for the dressing table, which the wardrobe was to match, but of course I hadn't kept the paint, and I hadn't written down the exact proportion because I had just mixed it. Moreover, I had completely forgotten how little colour you need to add to white. I poured about half a deciliter all-purpose white in a jar and added... hm, far too much blue. I blended in another half deciliter white, and it was still bright blue. I took a third of it and added more white. It felt like preparing a homeopathic extract.

What I got was, I think, a lovely colour, only it was nothing even near the dressing table (and I may repaint the dressing table now).

I was still pretending that I didn't know about the doors, and I felt really pleased with my project.

 

But I couldn't go on pretending forever, so I consulted my facebook friends. I had two options. I could sand the top and bottom of the doors, but the problem was that there were pin holes I was anxious to break. I could also try to take off the frame and glue the top and bottom trim half a millimetre up and down, which was risky, since the frame could break, and it wasn't certain it would work anyway. I was glad I hadn't glued the central divider, since my FB companion had warned me about possible complications. At least it wasn't entirely my fault: there was after all something wrong with the kit.

Anyway, after some contemplation I decided that sanding the doors was the least evil. You have no idea how much time and energy it takes to sand away a millimitre of wood! I was cautious not to sand too much, and I had to keep the edge straight, and every now and then I wanted to throw the whole thing in the dustbin. But after what seemed hours - and probably was - the doors fit, and I could paint them as well.

I drilled holes for knobs and put them in. I even found gold stickers that I used many, many years ago on my first clumsy furniture.

I was prepared for a battle with pins, but to my surprise they behaved, and it didn't take me more than three attempts. I had almost breathed out, but a new problem was already looming: the central divider that I had been warned about. When I inserted it - cleverly without gluing - the doors wouldn't close.

Since I had been warned I didn't throw it in the dustbin. Instead, I took out more sandpaper, and after another hundred hours the silly thing finally fit.

Imagine: the doors opened and closed, everything was neat and fine. I could hardly believe it, waiting for the next trick.

And it came. There must be something wrong with this kit, because I have never before had so many problems with things not fitting. The drawers were at least half a millimetre too large on all sides. Or the drawer boxes too small. More sandpaper. But I had made up my mind to finish, and I did.

 

And with doors open:

 

And in its environment, the master bedroom:





To take the picture, I have removed some objects from the front for a better view. The wardrobe is so pretty that I'd like to display it better, but there is really no other place for it. Now I need to fill the shelves with clothes.

Queen Anne wardrobe

I have promised myself that I won't make any more Chippendale miniatures before I do at least some work on the house - not just putting up new chandeliers, but also finish curtains, hang pictures, find place for all small objects still in boxes. It will go on forever, but at least some progress...

Then my Chippendale group suggested another challenge, and we decided on Queen Anne wardrobe because it is an intimidating piece, and it's great to support each other as you go.

I knew I wanted to replace the old wardrobe in the master bedroom. Not that there is anything radically wrong with it. But it is plain. I got it in a bundle from ebay so I have no attachment to it.

But of course I wanted the new wardrobe painted whitish, and I wanted it to match the dressing table.

I will tell the story in detail because it is illuminating. It has been a while since I showed a project step by step, but I took lots of pictures for the challenge so I can just as well share them. And reflect on the process.

So the first thing to do is, as usual, lay out the parts. Because it is a large piece, there were two layout sheets, one for the base and one for the cabinet.

 
Since I wasn't going to stain I could start assembling at once, after sanding all outside surfaces. This is part of the skill: figure out which will be outside surfaces. I was planning to have two different colours on the inside and outside, and typically I would paint first, but in this case I knew that the inside of the base, where the drawers go, would be unpainted. Therefore I could glue it together right away.

 

You would think that after the numerous chests I had made this would be child's play, but each piece is unique and has its own intricacies. The drawer boxes are very low and hard to manipulate, and one shelf had to be flush with the back and the other two flush with the front, so it was less straightforward than a simple chest. And as you see, it had to dry held by tape. Sometimes I use rubber bands, but there were too many details to keep in place.

While it was drying I had a look at the other layout sheet.

It was frightening, until I realised that four panels and sixteen small parts were drawers, and if I assembled the drawers the rest would be much more manageable. This is the wisdom you have gained after you have made a dozen chests. Therefore I identified the drawer parts and glued the drawers, except fronts that I would add later.

 

Everything became clearer now. Also, I forgot to mention that I had sanded the legs first of all. This is another wisdom gathered after a number of cabriole leg chairs and sideboards. Sand a leg every now and then, when you need a rest from intellectual work. It takes ages.

So as I returned to the base I had legs ready.

 

This was best to leave to dry overnight, and I switched my attention to the cabinet. I knew I wanted to wash the inside with light blue, and now I could figure out which the inside was, sides, back and shelves. I have used wash on several pieces, including the kitchen cabinet, and the secret is, as with so many other things, patience. You may think that if you use diluted paint one coat will be enough, but it isn't. To have a nice wash effect you need three to four coats. But it's worth while.

This assembly also had to dry overnight, which left me with doors. Now, I know that I am profoundly stupid when it comes to three-dimensional thinking. Trigonometry was my worst subject in school, and I cannot do any 3D puzzles. So I spent a very, very long time trying to figure out how to assemble the doors. The instruction is very simple, and I looked at the picture, and I just didn't get it. I was about to appeal to my Chippendale group companion, but then I happened to turn a part upside down, and it all became clear. This keeps happening to me all the time.

 

Again, based on previous mistakes I remembered to check the pin holes so that I quite correctly ended up with one left and one right door.

The next step in the instructions was to assemble the front frame, which felt tricky, as I was sure it would break when I lifted it.

 

As you probably see I use a plastic chopping board as work surface so that the assembly doesn't stick. And I managed to lift it and glue on to the cabinet.

 

This felt good, until I tested the doors and found that they were a millimetre taller than the frame.  A millimetre is a huge error in this scale.

 

There could be two reasons for this. Firstly, the parts didn't fit. This does not happen with these kits, they are precision-cut. Therefore it was my fault; I had obviously done something wrong.

It was quite late in the evening, and I couldn't cope with it. Instead, I put the cabinet on top of the base and pretended that I had simply finished for the day.

 

Then I went to bed. And as a good storyteller, I will keep you in suspense so that you come back to read the rest of the story.



To be continued.