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The first furniture casualties (and I scratch build a bar)

The good thing about getting my two Butterwick houses together and getting their floors done is that I could begin to test the furniture a little bit better. I'd made sizers out of cardstock based on the measurements of the buildings, but it turns out those were a bit too large. I didn't account for the width of the walls!

What this means is that my lovely pub bar that I'd gotten for the taproom was a smidge too wide for the building, and the even lovelier settle (both from Petworth Miniatures) was a bit too wide for where I wanted to put it.


I ordered a new settle that should be narrower, and this one might still find life elsewhere in the project. Although as I also realized that splitting the floor above the pub into a formal dining room and a billiard room was not going to work, and this Petworth billiard table was also a casualty...


...I think I might just save them all and do a nice (somewhat more modern) country pub after this project!

This meant I still needed a bar, though, and I decided to see if I could turn my lemons into lemonade. I did research and tap pulls like the one in the Petworth bar were actually invented in the 18th century, so it wasn't completely inaccurate. But I also don't think they were very widespread at the time my inn would have been at its peak.

So I decided to see if I could scratch build a Georgian bar. And it turns out, I could!


I started out thinking I'd do the wood stained and then decided a paint scheme would be a bit more Georgian.


Actually I changed my mind a few times about various things with the paint!


Most of the structure was made with the square strips of wood, so I filled in gaps with DAP Crackshot.



Hooks were decidedly not going to happen at this scale, but I figured out that I could hang the tankards using thread. I glued in the hole, pushed one end of the thread in with the needle, cut it, wrapped the other end around (that was the tricky part...required a lot of patience!) and pushed that in as well until it was tight.



Starting to come together...


And here it is! I still have a bit of touch-up painting to do and I may add either a bowl of apples or some other sort of food near the central pillar. But overall I'm pretty chuffed with it. It's by far the largest thing I've scratch built and it's a lot more historically accurate.




This is an illustration of a coffee house, but many bars of the time were similar.



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