Beacon Hill Build Resumes

I don't recall when I last worked on the Beacon Hill. Apparently I didn't photograph the work already done. 

This is what the studio looked like this afternoon. The BH is buried under stuff on the back table. My work table (on the left) is buried with some of Lloyd's building boxes. His table is holding the skeleton of a papier maché sculpture. I spent an hour or so and managed to get surfaces cleared and push Lloyd back into his area.

Once the house was on the worktable, the question of the wall between the foyer/dining area and living room came into play. I've decided that the foyer/entrance will be just that. It's way too small for a dining room for such a fine house. The plan is to make the room to the left a dining room and pretend that the kitchen is in another building behind the main house, an arrangement that would not have been unusual at the time.

The next two photos show the walls the way they are designed. I don't like the way it blocks the view in to the living room.

Here's option No. 1: move the leading part of the wall into the foyer area. This opens up the view into the living room yet keeps the spirit of the wall-jog from the original plan. It adds an inch (one foot) to the living room. The slots in the floor need to be dealt with. Shouldn't be that big a problem. Rugs, maybe.

Option No. 2 takes out the jog and slants the near part of the wall. This really opens up the living room. In an effort to make the moved wall line up with the wall on the floor above, it creates a slanted wall which looks silly, now that I've had a chance to study it. No matter what happens to the wall, I want to move the door into the living room. I'll use the new cut-out to fill in the original doorway.

Option No. 3 occurred to me as I typed the above. Why not just straighten out the wall completely? I slid the staircase into place and realized that if the wall is straightened, it fits precisely.

The living room is now lovely and spacious. So spacious, that I'm thinking maybe to cut the new doorway but leave the original one.

Seen straight on, the new wall placement lines up with the backside of the closet on the floor above. This pleases my need for order.

Next step: Cut out the new doorway and then glue the pieces of the "new" wall together.

The Wall is Up

I woke up this morning with several things to do, but the wall kept calling to me. I got into a groove and forgot to pick up the camera, but you can easily see how this was done. I cut a door shaped hole in the center, added a piece to fill in the front of the wall, then cut balsa into strips for trim. The door is thicker balsa hinged with faux leather hinges. There's a little shelf above the door. I'll surprise you later with what's going on it. :)


The other side of the wall has trim around the door but none of the timbers. I'm considering it to be plastered over. I winged the pattern for the beams. I have no idea if they are properly engineered or not, but if you consider that this cottage is supposedly carved from a large mushroom, how heavy can the load on it be?

By the way, the wall is not glued in place. If I ever want to take the hammocks out for cleaning or refurbishing, the wall has to come out. It's wedged in very nicely. I have no fear of collapse unless the elves get a really wild party going!

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.

The White Orchid -- the story begins

Once upon a time, not long ago, Greenleaf Dollhouses produced an exceedingly shy limited version of the popular Orchid dollhouse in a gleaming white styrene plastic instead of wood. I was lucky enough to snag one of the elusive little houses, and it spoke to me almost immediately. The satiny smooth whiteness reminded me of a beautiful white mushroom -- one with a red polka-dot cap!

We've had a red capped mushroom on our Christmas tree for as many years as I can remember. It's a sign of good luck. This is one from our current tree. We have six. :)

Then, not long after the house arrived, I found five little elves in the gift shop at the Nelson-Atkins Art Museum in Kansas City. They told me a mushroom house in the Bohemian forest would be just the ticket for them as they hopped into my pocket for the ride home. About that time, a fairy godmother tugged at my sleeve and presented her credentials as an elf wrangler. She was a bit big, I thought, but the elves appeared to be in need of a strong hand, so they joined company to wait for me to get started on their house.

There was a bit of a challenge with scale in this project, as the house and fairy godmother are 1:12 and the elves are closer to 1:24. The fairy godmother was beginning to get a bit restless; I'm not sure she understood the full scope of her responsibilities and was somewhat upset when she found a couple of the elves building a still instead of a toy train layout.

But then I found a Santa in roughly 1:24 scale in a 75%-off Christmas sale bin, and the challenge was met. The fairy godmother has gone to do her fairy godmother thing, although she promises to drop back to visit now and then. Santa won't be living with the elves, but since their workshop is on the ground floor and their living quarters upstairs, he'll be dropping in frequently to keep an eye on their progress -- and mine, too, I think!

Here's a picture of the house in dry fit. I'll tell you more about the building process later, but I want you to see the cuckoo's nest above the porch. The Great Spotted Cuckoo will live there.