I haven't posted in a while because I haven't really completed anything lately. I am still working away on both Butterwick Houses, but I thought I would at least post some pictures of work in progress.
One of the tricky things with these houses has been figuring out my plan to build them. The reason for this is that they will eventually be joined in some fashion -- their balconies will connect to form the gallery. The bottom part of them needs to be in a stone finish, and I couldn't put the lower windows in until the stone finish was done around them. But the stone finish couldn't be completed until the upstairs was more complete and I attached the balconies. Add to this a whole lot of wallpaper and details which means I really need to work on the rooms from the bottom up without the upper floor in place for each room, and it became a real conundrum.
Ultimately what I decided to do was to do part of the front stone, particularly around the windows. I'll then have to connect it up later, which is probably going to be tricky. I say this because although the first front went quite well, I totally messed up the second. I wish that I had done them both simultaneously but there was I think a couple weeks between the two, and what I forgot to do on the second front was to use a ball stylus to widen the gaps between the stones after I'd scored them with my sharp stylus. So the stones looked much more mashed together than they had on the first one and they were not going to match up. I tried to do some salvage but once the paint is on the CrackShot (my choice for this sort of work) it gets all weird and crumbly when you try to scrape at the paint. I ended up having to sand it all off and start fresh with a new layer of CrackShot. But it did come out better the second time!
The photos I took were of the first house. You can see the progress as I first covered with a layer of CrackShot...
Then scored with a sharp stylus...
For a whole lot of stones...
Then I scored them out deeper with a ball stylus and painted with a layer of Petite Properties' Dirty Stone Mortar...
The final step was to dry brush with some different colors. I used I think four different Petite Properties paints: Soot Ash, Dirty Stone, Warm Stone, and Wishy Washy Stone. Once that was done, I could install those lower windows, as there's no wallpaper in the pub.
Once I'd got the other details in that I needed to in the pub, like the candles (from Petworth Miniatures) and painting above the fireplace, I could install the floor above it and get to work on the next room, which is a formal dining room. And there was one more big thing I needed to do before that: painters tape all of the coal grates in place on their floors. I dug HUGE channels for them just to ensure they would be able to move up and down as I needed them to, behind the firebacks. You can see them in the photos on my flagstones post.
The photo below was part of a furniture test...I'm still awaiting the new settle that should, well, settle the furniture. ;-)
The first order of business for working on the dining room was to get the wallpaper in on the front. I've been relying heavily on painter's tape for the Butterwick Houses, to do things like hold the fronts on long enough for measurements, i.e. ensuring the wallpaper will fit correctly once it's assembled. The wallpaper itself is from Mini Minutia on Etsy. It's a fantastic shop for historic wallpaper and I'm slowly building up a little hoard from them, although at least I'm using some of it up!
Once the front wallpaper was in, I could do the sides. It was tricky getting this particular print to line up correctly...I had to keep trimming a bit at a time until the corners looked good. I don't have a good recommendation for applying wallpaper...everything I've tried mostly works but it feels very stressful doing it! I tried tacky glue first, brushed to a thin layer, and that worked okay. I tried Mod Podge with the same technique but it felt like it didn't hold its stickiness quite as long, so I went back to tacky glue.
Once the wallpaper went in, I installed the fireplace and fireback, which involved another tricky alignment since the the fireback was wrapped in wallpaper. The fireplace is also from Petworth Miniatures, and spray painted to match the wainscoting (more on that in a future post). I had to keep scraping out the decoration as I added layers of spray paint, so it was a bit of a pain to get it to match, but I felt it was important that it did so with the white color. As you can see in the photo, I glued the coal grate to the fireplace first, then put in the fireback and glued that to the wall, quickly following with gluing the fireplace to the fireback.
With the wallpaper in, it was time to install the hardwood floor, again from S.H. Goode. Unlike certain things which are time-sensitive and stressful, I really enjoy doing the hardwood floors. All you have to do is measure the long strips out and cut them to size (and with wainscoting or baseboards you don't have to be super accurate), and then glue them down. The only real trick is to keep pulling them tight together as you go (and usually you need to cut a notch to get them to fit around the fireplace corners.
You can see me pulling them tight together in the photo below...
Below is one I had to notch in order to fit it in with the fireplace...
And all done...there's a bit of a gap there but the wainscoting should cover it.
I've also started on a push to try to get all of the dining room furniture assembled. I've had the table together for quite a while, to understand fitting (it's how I realized this room couldn't be divided into a dining room and a billiard room). But I had to make the chairs (all from Petworth) and also have been working on what will populate the table.
One of the table items I'm super happy with is this candelabra centrepiece, from a Petworth kit. I ordered some rose heads from Stewart Dollhouse, and glued them on with bits of embroidery thread for the greenery. It came out lovelier than I was expecting!
I have also been gathering up all of my lovely Medieval Miniatures food to try to see what will fit on the table and sideboard. Answer: not as much as I had thought.
It's going to be great when I finally get all of this together (I'll provide more details on where everything is from them). But as you can see by the lopsided silver objects in the midst of the table, this was meant to have TWO fully filled three-tier serving thingys, and I miffed cutting one off of the sprue, so that the top broke off. So I've ordered another, but that's it for trying to get the table all set until then. But truly, I'm feeling a bit chuffed just that I manged to get a tablecloth glued down properly, because I was a bit worried about that.
I also made curtains for the dining room. Because I am a crazy person, I thought I would try Georgian-style ruched curtains. The first attempt I had to completely toss as it turned into a mess quickly. But the second came out fairly well, if not completely symmetrical. Making them basically involved wrapping the top of the fabric around a piece of wood and fabric gluing in place, then gathering up the ends one fold at a time and fabric gluing each fold. I wrapped the ends in silver embroidery thread because they were a bit messy under there. One thing I did learn while doing this, though, is that with if you dampen it, you can wipe up a fair amount of fabric glue if it's visible on fabric. I would have been on attempt #3 with the curtains if not for that.
And I've started on the wallpaper for the ground floor room of the second house. I'm thankful for the way the windows fit on these houses because it does allow some margin for error, as you can see in this pre-window picture of the cut wallpaper.
And here it is partly done!
This room is going to be a coffee room, and it will have a more masculine feel even than the dining room. The wallpaper is also from Mini Minutia and the chinoiserie design gives this room such a great period feel, just as the neoclassical wallpaper did for the dining room.
One of the tricky things with these houses has been figuring out my plan to build them. The reason for this is that they will eventually be joined in some fashion -- their balconies will connect to form the gallery. The bottom part of them needs to be in a stone finish, and I couldn't put the lower windows in until the stone finish was done around them. But the stone finish couldn't be completed until the upstairs was more complete and I attached the balconies. Add to this a whole lot of wallpaper and details which means I really need to work on the rooms from the bottom up without the upper floor in place for each room, and it became a real conundrum.
Ultimately what I decided to do was to do part of the front stone, particularly around the windows. I'll then have to connect it up later, which is probably going to be tricky. I say this because although the first front went quite well, I totally messed up the second. I wish that I had done them both simultaneously but there was I think a couple weeks between the two, and what I forgot to do on the second front was to use a ball stylus to widen the gaps between the stones after I'd scored them with my sharp stylus. So the stones looked much more mashed together than they had on the first one and they were not going to match up. I tried to do some salvage but once the paint is on the CrackShot (my choice for this sort of work) it gets all weird and crumbly when you try to scrape at the paint. I ended up having to sand it all off and start fresh with a new layer of CrackShot. But it did come out better the second time!
The photos I took were of the first house. You can see the progress as I first covered with a layer of CrackShot...
Then scored with a sharp stylus...
For a whole lot of stones...
Then I scored them out deeper with a ball stylus and painted with a layer of Petite Properties' Dirty Stone Mortar...
The final step was to dry brush with some different colors. I used I think four different Petite Properties paints: Soot Ash, Dirty Stone, Warm Stone, and Wishy Washy Stone. Once that was done, I could install those lower windows, as there's no wallpaper in the pub.
Once I'd got the other details in that I needed to in the pub, like the candles (from Petworth Miniatures) and painting above the fireplace, I could install the floor above it and get to work on the next room, which is a formal dining room. And there was one more big thing I needed to do before that: painters tape all of the coal grates in place on their floors. I dug HUGE channels for them just to ensure they would be able to move up and down as I needed them to, behind the firebacks. You can see them in the photos on my flagstones post.
The photo below was part of a furniture test...I'm still awaiting the new settle that should, well, settle the furniture. ;-)
The first order of business for working on the dining room was to get the wallpaper in on the front. I've been relying heavily on painter's tape for the Butterwick Houses, to do things like hold the fronts on long enough for measurements, i.e. ensuring the wallpaper will fit correctly once it's assembled. The wallpaper itself is from Mini Minutia on Etsy. It's a fantastic shop for historic wallpaper and I'm slowly building up a little hoard from them, although at least I'm using some of it up!
Once the front wallpaper was in, I could do the sides. It was tricky getting this particular print to line up correctly...I had to keep trimming a bit at a time until the corners looked good. I don't have a good recommendation for applying wallpaper...everything I've tried mostly works but it feels very stressful doing it! I tried tacky glue first, brushed to a thin layer, and that worked okay. I tried Mod Podge with the same technique but it felt like it didn't hold its stickiness quite as long, so I went back to tacky glue.
Once the wallpaper went in, I installed the fireplace and fireback, which involved another tricky alignment since the the fireback was wrapped in wallpaper. The fireplace is also from Petworth Miniatures, and spray painted to match the wainscoting (more on that in a future post). I had to keep scraping out the decoration as I added layers of spray paint, so it was a bit of a pain to get it to match, but I felt it was important that it did so with the white color. As you can see in the photo, I glued the coal grate to the fireplace first, then put in the fireback and glued that to the wall, quickly following with gluing the fireplace to the fireback.
With the wallpaper in, it was time to install the hardwood floor, again from S.H. Goode. Unlike certain things which are time-sensitive and stressful, I really enjoy doing the hardwood floors. All you have to do is measure the long strips out and cut them to size (and with wainscoting or baseboards you don't have to be super accurate), and then glue them down. The only real trick is to keep pulling them tight together as you go (and usually you need to cut a notch to get them to fit around the fireplace corners.
You can see me pulling them tight together in the photo below...
Below is one I had to notch in order to fit it in with the fireplace...
And all done...there's a bit of a gap there but the wainscoting should cover it.
I've also started on a push to try to get all of the dining room furniture assembled. I've had the table together for quite a while, to understand fitting (it's how I realized this room couldn't be divided into a dining room and a billiard room). But I had to make the chairs (all from Petworth) and also have been working on what will populate the table.
One of the table items I'm super happy with is this candelabra centrepiece, from a Petworth kit. I ordered some rose heads from Stewart Dollhouse, and glued them on with bits of embroidery thread for the greenery. It came out lovelier than I was expecting!
I have also been gathering up all of my lovely Medieval Miniatures food to try to see what will fit on the table and sideboard. Answer: not as much as I had thought.
It's going to be great when I finally get all of this together (I'll provide more details on where everything is from them). But as you can see by the lopsided silver objects in the midst of the table, this was meant to have TWO fully filled three-tier serving thingys, and I miffed cutting one off of the sprue, so that the top broke off. So I've ordered another, but that's it for trying to get the table all set until then. But truly, I'm feeling a bit chuffed just that I manged to get a tablecloth glued down properly, because I was a bit worried about that.
I also made curtains for the dining room. Because I am a crazy person, I thought I would try Georgian-style ruched curtains. The first attempt I had to completely toss as it turned into a mess quickly. But the second came out fairly well, if not completely symmetrical. Making them basically involved wrapping the top of the fabric around a piece of wood and fabric gluing in place, then gathering up the ends one fold at a time and fabric gluing each fold. I wrapped the ends in silver embroidery thread because they were a bit messy under there. One thing I did learn while doing this, though, is that with if you dampen it, you can wipe up a fair amount of fabric glue if it's visible on fabric. I would have been on attempt #3 with the curtains if not for that.
And I've started on the wallpaper for the ground floor room of the second house. I'm thankful for the way the windows fit on these houses because it does allow some margin for error, as you can see in this pre-window picture of the cut wallpaper.
And here it is partly done!
This room is going to be a coffee room, and it will have a more masculine feel even than the dining room. The wallpaper is also from Mini Minutia and the chinoiserie design gives this room such a great period feel, just as the neoclassical wallpaper did for the dining room.
Comments
Post a Comment