The oven wall

While fiddling with the outside bits, adding windows, etc., the inside has been nagging at me. I finally chopped up a piece of contractor's foam board to make a combo stairway/oven wall. This is the first attempt. About 2 inches near the window will be removed and the corner rounded a bit to make a little closet/nook. An alcove will be cut out for a half-inch scale woodstove. The baker is only 3" tall. I thought a full size stove would have her running up and down a ladder -- dangerous near a hot stove! The foam will be smoothed, Spackled, and gessoed so it will look more like the Sintra walls. The unfinished chair was the fairy godmother's. Since she has moved on, it won't figure in this project.

The little baker is very interested in what's happening. The little stove fits in there just right. The little baker likes the little stove. She says she can turn out all kinds of good Bohemian breads and pastries on it. We used a big emery board to sand down the rough edges. The contractor's foam is an inch thick, so the oven wall is two inches thick. You can see where the two slabs are joined.

I rummaged around in the construction materials bin and found a handful of bricks, enough to brick the back of the stove alcove make steps. The little baker and I had a discussion about how to finish off the steps. We debated between bricks or no bricks, but the bricks won. I told her they weren't glued in place so she'd better be careful how she stepped on them. She was careful, thank goodness.

We put the bricks away and painted the whole thing with gesso. There are some rough patches that need to be smoothed over with wallboard mud (I like to use it instead of Spackle. Personal preference), and the whole thing will get another coat of gesso and the stairstep bricks will be glued on. When the glue dries, we can grout the bricks, do a little aging on them, and slide the whole unit in place. The little baker called in two of her male counterparts to see what progress we've made. The one in the middle found something to get excited about, but I ignored him. The one on the right just wanted to know if the stove will be hooked up in time for supper.

The oven wall looked too new, so a bit of aging was called for. I bought these pastels at Hobby Lobby on sale for about a 10th of their original price. They are nice and soft, good for rubbing in with a fingertip or Q-tip.

The little baker just called me over. She says she needs to have a name. "Little baker" just isn't doing it for her. She's thinking about what she wants to be called. I guess each of the elves deserved a name.