Skip to main content

Tanglewood Hall

The next-farthest-along in my project is the Tanglewood Hall kit from Petite Properties. Rather than using it as a house, it will be part of the inn frontage. In my mind, the inn started smaller, and then took over the space next door.



Coaching inns tend to have two types of frontage on a high street: either the inn's rooms run along the high street, or there is passageway back to the inn yard, where the majority of the rooms are. This allows the space around the passageway to be utilised for shops.

I decided to make my inn a bit of a hybrid. So there will be a shop and a dressmaker/milliner's office on one side of the building, with a loft above them that's additional sleeping space for the inn. As part of growing and taking over some of this space, the inn added a second, main kitchen (more on the first one much later), and a bedroom upstairs.

The kitchen needs to work double-duty, as I learned that lower-class passengers on the stagecoaches would have eaten in the kitchen. So in addition to the pots and pans and food being cooked (again largely from Medieval Miniatures) there will also be a kitchen table that will eventually be dressed with a meal. I love tiny food and one of the fun challenges of this project has been gathering and assembling lots of different little meals for the different dining areas.


Herdwick Landscapes have fantastic Georgian style kitchen ranges, so that's what's gone into the Petite Properties surround. I'm attempting to make a little griddle to go beside it, and then there'll be a shelf with some utensils and other kitchen miscellany, and another shelf for the pots and pans up top.

As for the shop, most of the work is done, with loads of accessories already glued in, mostly from Stewart DollhouseMini From Italy, and Cynthia Howe Miniatures. The open window on the ground floor will be a shop window; you can see some pictures of it in the detail pics at the end of the post. I'm waiting until I do more of the finishing work on the exteriors to install the shop window.


One of the challenges of doing this one is figuring out the order to do things. I need to ensure that the wires for the upstairs lights pass down through the shop wall, while the upstairs fireplace needs to pass down behind the range. So I think I'm going to need to glue ALL of the upstairs together and then somehow pass the wires through, glue the stove, and finish gluing the upper floors. Oh, and get the floors in at some point, and wallpaper the bedroom (eek!).


Most of the shop and dressmaker/milliner's furniture is Petite Properties, as is the kitchen table, chairs, and butcher block stand. The dressmaker/milliner's table was originally supposed to be the kitchen table, but it was a bit too large for that space. I repainted it and I'm really happy with how it turned out for this purpose. These (simpler) Regency hats I made myself, but there's also bits of a Stewart Dollhouse hatmaking kit strewn about the table.












Next up (I think) will be gluing the loft bottom to the first floor, gluing some of the lighting wires in place and finishing the kitchen shelves and griddle, as it'll be much tougher to work in the kitchen once the upper floors are glued.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Where I bought all of the things

Updated 8/28/2021 with new shops I've noticed: I have been afraid to start on this post because it means going back through SO MANY posts and Pinterest pins and who knows what else, but I also know it's something I can do because I can recall how difficult it was to find items when I was looking to source everything I needed for this project. So this is as complete a list as I can make it, which means it's probably not complete at all...there are certainly shops missing where I just forgot where I got things or purchased one item from an Etsy or eBay store. I hope it will still be helpful to folks, though! Shops are generally listed under the category where I got the most items from but if I got a lot from several categories they are cross-listed. I've also included some web sites that have been on my radar or used for other projects even if I didn't use them for this one. They're  noted as such. These are all 1:48 scale or O Scale unless otherwise noted. Please...

Real flagstone floors for quarter scale

One of the things I've been doing for all of the buildings in the project is using real stones for flagstone floors, which I think really gives it a more authentic feel. I get them from Stacey's Miniature Masonry , and I thought I'd post a tutorial here on how they're done. The stones and mortar (which Stacey's also sells) come with instructions, but I think it'll be handy to see photos of the process. I like to lay down a coat of paint before starting, to give the stones something better to stick to, although there won't be any gaps once it's done. Then the first step of laying the floor is to glue all of the stones down with PVA adhesive (tacky glue). The recommended way to do it is to plan them all out in advance, but I don't have patience for that so I usually just wing it! That's probably how they did them back then anyway, right? At some point you'll probably need to cut a stone or two in half to get ones that fit your last remainin...

Tanglewood Hall is (mostly) done

I went on a big push this long weekend to try to get this house semi-finished (right now in the project I want to get them each to the point where their furniture can be stored within) and I succeeded. I posted about the Georgian Kitchen and the shop and modiste/milliner upstairs , but it was time to buckle down and do the wallpaper for the bedroom. I'd been procrastinating it both because it was to be my first time with wallpaper and also because it was a super-tricky first time with wallpaper. What I hadn't realized is that the arched fireplace I'd ordered for the bedroom had a really deep back. That wasn't necessarily bad as this one is above the kitchen stove which shows a pretty huge fireplace stack, but it necessitated a much bigger chimney breast than I'd used for the dog grates in Traveller's Rest . So I built one, but then that meant I had to either cut the wallpaper to fit its angles, or bend it in. I opted to bend it in, which mostly work...