House restoration: music room, dining room, smoking room

The next point of my attention was the music room. (I believe I am intuitively avoiding the great hall because it will involve mending the stairs). It was remarkably well preserved.

The ceiling decoration got off a bit, but was easy to glue back. The fireplace wasn't even attached so it was just putting it back, but the mirror had come down. The floor was wobbly, but it probably was wobbly to begin with. This floor is the first hardwood floor I made, many-many years ago, and today I would make it differently and better, but I keep it for sentimental reasons. However, this is a good moment to sand it better - again, my demands on myself are much higher today. I sanded a bit at the front, but won't do it properly now. I will finish all the restoration first before starting on further improvements. But I clearly saw that sanding, and polishing afterwards, would be an improvement.

Apart from that, it was just a matter of putting back the furniture.

This room is full of objects and dolls, so I will have to unpack and identify them.

Meanwhile, I move up to the dining room.

It is also in a reasonably good shape. A few floorboards missing, easy to replace, since they are coffee stirrers. I have the same problem with this floor: with my today's eyes, I see that it needs sanding and polishing. But not right now.

I need to hang the mirror and pictures and of course set the table. I also intend to replace the cupboard in the rear corridor with a more appropriate period piece, but this will also have to wait.

So finally, for this round, the study, or smoking room. Again, less damage than expected.

A few unstuck floorboards and mouldings, torn wallpaper.

When I put back objects, I started with the rear corridor, where, in addition to the bookcase, there are some pieces barely visible, except from the side window. I like such hidden nooks. You will see it better when the light is on.

In this picture you can also see the tear in the wallpaper. There is no way I can replace the wallpaper at this point, so I just mended it as neatly as possible. It is difficult to work on this level, because it's too high when you stand on the floor and too low if you use a stepladder. But somehow I managed.

I feel that I have reached the stage when I don't feel compelled to put every single item I own into this house so I will only add a few more. Last time, the room looked overflowing. Of course Victorian houses were overflowing, but it is also the matter of displaying things so that they can be admired and do not obscure each other. I am considering fewer dolls in each room, although this will feel like betrayal.

Anyway, now the whole right side is finished, at least as far as pure repairs are concerned.

I still need to do some work on the front. As I have been saying repeatedly, some people leave the inside of the fronts undecorated or at best decorate with paint or wallpaper to match the rooms. My concept is to create a sense of additional space, as if there were three extra rooms, each decorated differently and with as many flat or semiflat details as possible. As you see, I have mirrors, and I will also put back pictures, wall sconces and a book shelf with books.

Finally I did something long overdue. I had planned to use a magnet lock to keep the fronts firmly closed, but I never got round to it. Meanwhile, on another dollhouse I have, there is a hook for the purpose. I need something urgently because I have two inquisitive cats who have already explored the house, as cats do.

 

 I admit that this looks like a horror movie.

It doesn't work any longer to keep the fronts closed with tape, so I got a hook. I may find a better solution lately, but it works fine for now.

To be continued.

The most magnificent chandelier ever

Do you want to hear once again that a project is never finished? You probably don't, but I will say it anyway. And I will say again that every time I replace something in the house I feel bad about it. Especially if it is something I made myself very long ago, when I wasn't that good at making things.

This time I am replacing my crystal chandelier. It was among the very first objects I made ten years ago, and with all its faults I have been proud of it. I improved it when I decorated the dining room, and it can and will be further improved, but at the moment I have replaced it with a chandelier I bought last summer in the dangerous shop in Stockholm where I spend more money than I will ever admit. I got it relatively cheap because it was broken, but I was sure that my clever son-in-law would be able to mend it. I did try to solder it myself, but I am not very good at soldering, and it was such a delicate thing that I didn't dare. When my daughter and son-in-law visited us for holidays, he had a closer look at it and concluded that gluing it with superglue would work better than soldering, and since I have the deepest respect for his knowledge I agreed. He glued it, holding it together cleverly, at the same time pointing out that what I really needed for my miniature-making was a tool called third hand, which I immediately bought online, but by the time it arrived my wonderful son-in-law had left.

It took some time before I got down to putting up the chandelier, because to do so, I had to remove the floor of the room above, and I have once described the process. I had to remove all objects from the study, which is so high up that I need library steps to work comfortably. I know it's my own fault that the room is so crammed, but until you have to move them you don't even realise how many objects there are. Then I had to remove the floor, and because last time I put in the floor I was confident it was the very, very last time, it was if not permanently, but very firmly attached. I managed to pull it out without damaging too much of skirting, and while I was at it, sanded and varnished the floor a bit better. This is also typical: you become more and more demanding about the quality of your work. When I made this floor two years ago I was perfectly happy with it. Not any more. So this was an unexpected positive side effect.

I removed the old chandelier, burning with guilt. Then I started hanging the new chandelier and ran into some technical problems. The way I do it is hang the chandelier by a thin wire, the kind you find on wine bottles, then use a large darning needle to run the wire through the hole in the ceiling into the room above and fix it with masking tape. The trick is that the wire has to be strong enough to hold the weight of the lamp, but thin enough to go through the hole, and as I was working with it, the lamp broke again, as might be expected.

However, now I 1) knew that I could glue it 2) had a third hand. It still took a lot of manipulation, but I managed to glue and fix it, left it to dry for some days and today finally put it up. Isn't it fabulous?

Here is a view of the whole room where you can see how it is attached to the ceiling. The ceiling rose is a scrapbooking embellishment. The chandelier goes well together with the ancient mirror, from the same shop.

And this is the third hand. When you have got something like this you wonder how you could ever manage without it.

 

I think he has a very strong personality. Yes, I am confident it's a he. A bit like WALL-E. He has certainly already become a dear friend.

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.

Queen Anne serving table

While I was in the table mood, I also made another Queen Anne piece, a serving table with a marble top. The same kind of marble top as on the corner table. According to description, the marble top was for placing hot pots and pans without damaging the wooden surface.

 

This is a very interesting kit because it has a completely different design from other tables. In addition to the round table and the corner table, I have also made the three piece table, a side table, a serving table, and a tea table. But this kit was very special. Here are the parts:

 

This is my usual brown mahogany stain, but there is very little left, and probably I hadn't shaken the jar properly, because it looks darker. More like dark oak. Which is also pretty.

The instruction was very good and easy to follow:

 

The trick was to square the assembly very, very carefully and let it dry properly. The rest was easy:

 

But as you see, the construction is different, because the marble top has to be glued directly to the frame. Prior to that, the frame had to be varnished.

 

I think it's a beautiful piece. I think I am better at tables than sofas.

I placed it in the front of the dining room, which meant that I moved the lovely side table to the back. I guess I will be moving furniture around again and again.

Hepplewhite serving table

This was a very easy piece to make, but I put a lot of effort in the finish. I used fifteen coats of stain (brown mahogany) before I was quite happy, then two coats of varnish. I think it is a magnificent piece. The curves make it look delicate and elegant. The drawer can be opened.

The dining room is now so full that there is no room for another table, but for the time being I have replaced the side table you can see in this post with the cellarette. The side table can be anywhere, but the serving table doubtless belongs in the dining room.

Dumb waiter

I was of course wrong when I said in the previous post that I was done with Chippendale miniatures for a while. I have also made a dumb waiter, which I think is both a wonderful piece and a wonderful name for it.

There isn't much to show or tell: it was straightforward, and the only thing was to follow the instructions that said: be patient, don't rush, let the glue set between steps. To glue on legs at 120 degrees angle is always hard.

Here is the result:

And in the environment:

Now need to make more food to put on it.

Adam ceiling, dining room

My next Adam ceiling project is the dining room.

If you haven't yet seen my ceilings, here is the grand hall, the upper hall and the smoking room.

To make the dining room ceiling, I had to remove the floor in the room above it, which is the smoking room. (By the way, I did add a filigree ceiling rose to the smoking room ceiling, which was easy). Luckily, for whatever reason, one of the skirting boards in the smoking room had not been properly glued, so it was easy to lift up the floor. Of course I had to remove all the objects first. I also had to remove all objects from the dining room.

The old ceiling in the dining room is one that I was very proud of when I made it, almost a year ago. When the decoration - a plastic placemat -  fell off, I glued it back with very strong glue. Now I had to remove the decoration which still left me with a thick layer of glue. There is only one effective way of removing old glue, with a hair dryer. So that's what I did. It took longer time than I wanted to spend on such a trifle.  

Since there was already a drilled hole in the ceiling, I had to centre the paper around this hole and arrange the pattern accordingly. I glued on the filigree ceiling rose, which, unintentionally, made it much easier to test the paper. There is a chimney breast in this room so that I had to cut the paper around the chimney breast. All this should have been done a year ago, but then a year ago I didn't have the Adam paper. So I felt like a poor architect hired by a mad customer to put in new Adam ceilings in a house. 

Here is the result:

There will be coving of course, to cover the edges. Also, while I was messing about, one string in the crystal chandelier broke so I will have to mend it. Good that it broke before I put it up again.

I think it is a magnificent ceiling, and the whole house is starting to have a completely new look. I feel a bit bad about the old plastic placemat that has been so helpful for many projects, but it's time to move on. Come back soon.

Dining room floor

I have finished yet another floor which feels good because I've had too many unfinished projects recently. This is the dining room floor the beginning of which I showed when I started using my mitre tool. It was six weeks ago. I have been distracted by other things, including two other floors, reception room and entrance hall. But now I am finished, and of course I would have never been able to do it without mitre shears.


It was quite straightforward, just patience and more patience. Or was it? Can you notice anything peculiar about this floor? If you cannot, I have succeeded.

The thing is that the rear door won't open with the hardwood floor that is perhaps one millimetre thick. I tried sanding it down, but it didn't work. There is no way I can re-position the door without tearing down the whole wall. So instead I created an optical illusion. You need to look very, very closely to discover that the four squares on far right are partially made of paper, just to allow the door to open.

Since there will be a dining table obscuring the view nobody will ever notice it.


Now this room is also almost finished, just mouldings left. There will of course be a mirror over the mantelpiece, other ornaments, pictures, curtains and lights.

This is what it looks like in the evening:

Another big disaster

To be frank, it came before the one I have already admited. It was so frustrating that I just went on to do something else, although it wasn't very hard to correct.

Do you remember the cupboard I got in my bargain about a month ago? I mended it to the best of my abilities, putting "glass" in the doors, and moved the pretty china from the old cupboard that wasn't to scale and generally unsatisfactory. (I know I am repeating myself, but it is remarkable how, when you make an improvement, you wonder how on earth you could put up with an unsatisfactory solution).

The cupboard was going into the rear corridor behind the dining room.

Clever as I am, I tested carefully that, unlike the bookshelf in the smoking room that had to be attached permanently before I sealed off the corridor, this cupboard went easily through the door.

Only it didn't. Not after the partition was in place. The corridor was too narrow.

This was one of those moments when I want to give up and throw the whole project into a garbage bin. No, actually I want to throw myself into a garbage bin, worthless as I am.

Instead, as I said, I switched my attention over to something else and for a couple of weeks pretended that the dining room didn't exist. But of course it did, and I could not postpone dealing with it forever. I didn't take step-by-step pictures because it was painful, almost humiliating. I pulled out the partition, tearing down wallpaper. I believe this is when my ceiling decoration fell off. I put in the cupboard. I redecorated the back wall, including the chimney breast. I trimmed the corners. I glued on door surrounds. All this was very difficult to do inside the room. All in all, it took me about twelve hours.

While I was at it, I repaired the crystal chandelier. To be honest, I merged two old chandeliers, simply adding six more threads in between the existing ones. It was a huge improvement.Then I had to tear up floorboards in the room above to fix the chandelier.

Here is the result.

No mouldings yet, and you can see I have just started making a new floor. I will tell you about it in the next post.

Back to priming

It was a sunny morning, and I decided that I would take the opportunity to prime the few remaining parts of the house, mostly banisters. It will be long before I come to making stairs and balconies, but it may be equally long before the weather permits working outdoors. As it turned out, I had overestimated the mildness of British December weather. It was ice-cold, and if I get pneumonia and die, it's the dollhouse's fault. But it is done now, and I am glad I did all the major priming in summer.

While doing this tremendously tedious work once again - and banisters are more tedious than large surfaces of walls and ceilings - my thoughts kept returning to the £25,000 house, although it doesn't deserve it. Did they prime the banisters? You can buy assembled stairs, painted and all, and that's what they did, I can see it. You can hang wallpaper without priming the walls, and that's what they probably did. They didn't even bother to put in cornices! You can possibly paint windows without priming them (although I found it hard), and it will save you hours and hours of priming, sanding, painting, sanding... But who knows, maybe they sent the windows to be primed and sanded by children in Thailand, and the postal costs added to the price of the house.

Anyway, a pile of primed banisters is not much to show, so I will instead share the most recent picture of the dining room where I have temporarily put in floors from another room and like it so much that I will perhaps leave it like this. The doors are obviously not painted yet, and I haven't decided whether they will be white or dark. The window is not properly inserted. Mouldings will be added. The ceiling will be decorated. There will of course be wall sconces, pictures and other details that the £25,000 house doesn't have.

I am making slow progress. But I am enjoying it all the more.

Another fancy wall

I am now at the stage where there is no particular order in what I do, so I am making another fancy wall, the one in the dining room. I tried it out earlier, when I made a chimney breast, but now I will do it properly. The dining room has a rear partition, behind which there will be another secret corridor. So I started with a bare wall.

The wallpaper I had used before was a low-resolution printout, just to test. I have now printed it out properly - it comes from Jennifer's printables, which is a terrific resource. First, I changed the wallpaper on the chimney breast, which I then pasted on the wall. Then I hung the wallpaper on both sides of the fireplace. I used lining paper to make the bottom panel.

 

I first planned to attach a wooden dado rail, but then I remembered the 1:1 wallpaper I had used to make the fireplace so I found it and made the rail to match the fireplace. It was much easier. 

There is a deliberate gap between the wallpaper and the ceiling where the cornice will be added. The floor is temporary.

 

When I have gone that far I realised that I needed to finish the rear corridor before it was sealed off. It isn't as crucial as in the basement because there is a back wall I will put in last of all. Still, I wanted to test what it may look like. I had by chance placed the Chippendale chest-on-chest in the rear corridor, and it immediately felt perfect (I have tested other pieces, and none felt as good).

I had not thought about the colour scheme of the rear corridors because it had felt less relevant, but in fact it is about time. So I tried various coloured paper and wasn't happy. Then I found some sheets of old wallpaper from the Victorian living room. It is worn out, and I would not use it in a front room, but for the rear corridor it was fine. Of course, no one will ever see the reverse of the partition once I have sealed the back wall, but for my own satisfaction I wallpapered it. I may even put up some pictures which no one will ever see. 

 

You cannot see it very well in the picture, but there is light in the rear corridor, and when I have fixed it properly, I am sure it will look great. 

Next, I made the side wall, pasting the wallpaper onto the white lining paper and adding the rail. When everything is properly fixed and finished, the ceiling painted, the floor put in, the doors painted, etc - I believe this will be a very grand room. 

It took me two evenings, about six hours altogether, to make these two walls.