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.

Step by step: reception room

As I have been making and sharing Chippendale furniture recently I have realised that I have no good pictures of Womble Hall room by room. When I post something saying that this particular piece will go into this or that room I have no pictures to link to.

I have also been planning to write blog posts following the progress of one and the same room over two years. Yes, it has been two years, and I am not finished (depends of course on how you define "finished").

It will take me some time to write these posts, but I think it will be interesting for myself, and for you, dear reader. Occasionally, when I look at some old picture I can't believe what it once looked like.

I will start with the reception room, and I will both insert pictures and links to earlier relevant posts.

So: the main kit arrived just about two years ago, and I started priming and painting, but I made a dry assembly at an early stage, to see what the various rooms might be. In this post, for instance you can already see that I put in a fireplace, a mirror and Chippendale chairs, and they have remained in the same place.

I had not remembered, when I started writing this post, that I actually began with the reception room, testing the walls and the paneling. So here is the very first picture of the reception room:

 

The wallpaper is not the same as in the final decoration, the upper rail is cut from a 1:1 wallpaper, the floor is from the old Victorian house and now in a different room. But the white panel with golden squares is still there.

The next thing I made in this room was a chimney breast. I didn't have chimney breasts in the old house, but here I wanted to do everything properly. This is what it looked like when I was finished:

Note that I had some objects in the room all the time, even though the walls were bare. I thought it was important to have the details for overall effect.

In the next step, I removed the back and painted and wallpapered it while it was flat, which I still, after many mistakes and failures, recommend rather than decorating a fully assembled house. In this picture you can see the back wall of the reception room, now with the final wallpaper and beginning of paneling.

It took almost three months before I moved on with this room because I was working on the basement. But when I went back to reception room it was time to decorate the side walls. And I made a daring attempt.

Here is what I ended up with. It was grand, but eventually I had to tear it down. The seams didn't look neat, and I couldn't think of a good way to fix them. Pity, because it does look fabulous. But I know I would have gone crazy after a while.

By Christmas 2014 I had made significant progress, but had still not glued the shell together. At my Christmas party, people admired the house, but they didn't see that it wasn't glued together, that the wallpaper was white-tacked, that the stairs were not attached at all, or that the windows and doors weren't properly inserted.

By the end of January, I made the ceiling decoration:

I haven't got a detailed description of how I made this one, but a similar.

Mid-February, I was prepared to start gluing, but that's when I noticed a lot of small mistakes, including the reception room walls. This is what it looked like when I made the correction. Note that I had given up on the previous upper rail and instead used edges of a paper placemat.

Mid-March I finally glued the shell together, and the reception room, or what would become the reception room, can be seen in the left bottom corner:

 Of course you can see it as a step back, but at some point the shell had to be glued. As soon as I had managed, with huge effort, to force in all floor dividers, I put back as many objects as I could. So at the end of March the reception room looked like this:

And on the whole it still looks like this. The Greek statues are souvenirs from Greece. The chandelier is a Christmas ornament. The white pedestals are wedding cake decorations. The vases are from charity shops. But of course it didn't end here. For instance, I added fire to the fireplace. Not huge progress, but anyway. The old floor has been moved elsewhere so it's just bare primed surface.

 

In June 2015, I made a new floor for the reception room. It was a long project that took weeks. By that time, I had finally got mitre shears, and cutting crafts sticks became easier. After that, the room looked like this:

I believe by this time I had glued in the windows, but I had to wait with the doors until both this floor and the floor in the adjacent room were finished.

At the end of November 2015, my son-in-law helped me install lights. The reception room looked grand for Christmas.

Here, the door is properly set in, a Chippendale daybed has joined the chairs, and there are pictures on the walls. All small details, but make a huge difference.

In December, I made curtains for most of the rooms, including the reception room. And I also made new ceilings for all rooms, using the Adam gift wrapping paper. And added expensive Georgian cornices. After which the room looked like this (the cornice on the left looks a bit untidy, but that's because there is a wire clip in that corner):



You would think that was it. Well, maybe some more pictures, some more ornaments, but no major alterations. But a dollhouse project is never finished. I found a new chandelier. After that, the room looked like this:



Not a big deal, you say? Come and visit me and let's hear what you say then.

So this is how long I have come, two years after I started. 




As you see, there is now a doll, and I think she fits perfectly in this environment. Of the details, there is a Chippendale corner chair, window seat and fire screen. But don't ask me whether it is finished. It will never be.

Duncan Phyfe window seat

This is an interesting and unusual item.

I don't think I would have discovered it if it hadn't been a part of the House of Miniatures collection. I didn't know anything about Duncan Phyfe, but haven't I stated repeatedly how educational miniature-making is?

I have a full-scale bench that is very similar, but I don't think it is a Duncan Phyfe. It's very old though, with a lovely Morris fabric.

This project was another weekend challenge with some people from my wonderful Facebook group. I so much enjoy making the same item at the same time (with some shifts because of time zones). Sharing experience and mistakes. 

I won't show the step-by-step pictures because it was just a matter of patience when the legs and the splats wouldn't stay, and I am still not quite happy withe the cushion - I may have to do it all over again. But - here it is:

 

I used the same fabric I had used for the cabriole leg chairs, the day bed and the corner chair (which I apparently haven't shared here) as they will all be in the same room:




If you have been following my blog you may notice that there is a new doll in the ball room. I have tried several dolls in this room, and they felt wrong. But this pretty lady is perfect, isn't she?

Queen Anne firescreen

This wasn't a hugely challenging project, especially after the Chippendale firescreen. More precision leg-gluing, but I am really getting better at it.

 

It was my serious intention to cover this screen with a pretty cross-stitch piece from Ely cathedral, but as I tried it felt much too crude. I may find something else, but actually I think it is so pretty as it is that I may leave it like that. It looks great in the room.

I find it remarkable how, when you have added a nice detail to a room you cannot even image how it could have been without. If you look at my previous post showing the same room you may notice the old firescreen that had been there for a long time and done a good job. But you see the difference, don't you?

Another stunning chandelier

As I have accounted for, I once again spent a fortune in a dollhouse shop in Stockholm, and I have already shown what I did with one of the three chandeliers I bought.

I was reluctant to start on the next because I knew it involved removing a permanently fixed wooden floor in the room above. But I also knew it was inevitable because what's the use of a beautiful chandelier if it isn't put up in a room?

So here is the story of how I replaced a 50p plastic Christmas ornament with a £150 19th-century pewter chandelier of exquisite beauty.

 

 Mind, there is nothing wrong with the Christmas ornament. I like it, it fits very well into this room, and I have had it ever since I started making dollhouses, ten years ago. It has served me well, and I will probably use it in another project. I always feel bad about replacing an old faithful object. But now I had this magnificent chandelier, and it was going into this room because that's where it belonged.

I have already described the procedure of replacing ceiling lights. First, I removed all objects in the room above. I don't fix small objects on tables because I don't want to spoil the surfaces, but every time I evacuate a room all the tiny cups and plates and cakes and fruit come flying all over. I tell myself that I probably should fix them after all, but I won't because I have seen what happens to a fine table top after a cup has been fixed with a sticky dot.

Anyway, I removed the objects and tried to pull out the floor without removing the skirting boards, but of course I had done the job well, because I was sure everything was permanent. I managed to lift the floor just enough to get hold of the wire from which the chandelier was hanging. Halfway done, the old chandelier removed.

The next step was to attach a wire to the new chandelier and feed the wire through the hole. I use very thin wire of the kind you get around wine bottles. It can then be threaded into a large darning needle and drawn through the hole. Only the needle was too long for the narrow space.

To make a long story short, it was a long story. I would have needed another pair of hands. But here is the result:

It is very difficult to take a good picture that does justice to this magnificent piece. Trust me, I have taken a dozen. Here is a close-up that at least gives a better idea:

 

I will need to fix the candles better as they tend to fall off. And I wonder whether this chandelier now demands a different ceiling rose. As always, each improvement demands the next step.

If you wonder how the floor in the room above fared after this, there were some problems which I don't even want to discuss. I went to bed desperate, after putting the heaviest dictionary I could find on the newly re-attached floor. It looked fine in the morning, and all objects went back again. I have lost count of how many times things have been taken out and back again in each room. But if I had waited until "everything was finished" I would probably still have had empty rooms.

Fireguard

Once upon a time, more precisely three years ago, I bought some buckles at a carboot sale.

I was confident then that they would be useful for something - mirror frames maybe? - but they turned out to be one of those things that you save for years and never use. However, as I was going through some missing bits in the house, I needed a fireguard. I have a few, made from different things, and this time I remembered the buckles. This is a typical fireguard, don't you think?

But it needs some improvement. I believe of all rubbish I bought at flea markets ten years ago, when I had just started making miniatures, lacy plastic placemats were among the most useful. It's easier to say what I have not used them for.

Then paint gold, to fit the environment.

 And here it is!

Adam ceiling: reception room

I really thought I was done with ceilings, but of course once you have started any other ceiling just doesn't look right.

If you haven't seen my Adam ceilings, have a look at dining room, the gentlemen's smoking room, the drawing room, the grand hall, the upper hall, corridor and guest bedroom, nursery and servants' room.

The reception room has a magnificent ceiling that I am very proud of.  And yet, with all other Adam ceilings, the white border around the centerpiece doesn't look magnificent anymore.

Of course there is no way I can tear down the centerpiece. Moreover, because I was hundred percent sure I would not add any detail I had attached wooden coving. So now I had to build the ceiling around it. With all my previous ceiling training, I knew how to do it. 

 

It is just a matter of precision. And patience. And more patience. Once again, I wish I had this paper a year ago when I was decorating the ceilings on flat surfaces. But - it wasn't available then, and it is solely my decision to make these ceilings. Whatever you say, my house is absolutely unique.

Another fireplace

As I mentioned, I have several fireplace fronts that I will use in Womble Hall, but for all of them I need to make chimney breasts. And making a chumney breast for an existing front is slightly different than making everything from scratch as I did last time. This time I will make a chimney breast for my wooden fireplace. I will make it from foam again: I think it worked well.

The only big difference is that I need to make neat sides. For this, I need a balsa strip. It is easy to work with balsa: you just cut it with scissors. The lolly sticks I also use for this project are hard.

It does not matter that there is a gap between the bits because I will cover it with another strip - a lolly stick. 

While the sides were drying, I made the back. I was clever this time as used black card so I didn't have to paint it. Of course I still had to paint the inside. I didn't bother to glue in "stones" this time - I can alsways do it later. I already have a hearth for this fireplace. It is another piece of a plastic lid, and the fireguard is a buckle.

Then I painted the sides. I may need to use some filler to make them look neat. This fireplace will be in the reception room that I tested some days ago. I have not decided what wallpaper I will have in this room, but I wanted to see the fireplace with wallpaper, so I used a bit of a paper tablecloth I had saved from a party. It is not exactly the same colour as the wall, but it is all temporary anyway. The tablecloth is slightly embossed which gives a nice effect.

Now imagine: wallpaper, wall panels, rails, richly decorated ceiling, a chandelier, wall lights, silk curtains, paintings in heavy gilded frames. This will be a splendid room. I may use this old tablecloth for wallpaper.