As I've mentioned, my style of building is to decorate as I go, so the "R&P"portion of my building includes wallpapering before I assemble the shell. With the Magnolia, I had one other step to do before beginning the wallpaper process. I had decided to install skylights in the roof in both the computer room and bedroom, so while the house was in dry fit, I marked off the places to make my cuts.

I used a drill bit in my dremel to make the pilot holes in each corner of the areas marked for skylights. These holes were just large enough for the blade of my mini jigsaw to fit into and I used the jigsaw to make the straight cuts. The end result is two roof pieces that look like this:

The "skylights" that I decided to use are 24 pane windows from Houseworks. They have a great finished look and were perfect for the style. First I painted the windows:

While the paint was drying, I painted the exterior of the roof and wallpapered the interior sides.

I'm going to pause for a quick note here about why I paint the exterior of pieces before I wallpaper the other side. When you paint and wallpaper before assembly, there's a chance of the pieces warping. By painting one side and wallpapering the other as soon as the paint has dried, I've sealed both sides of the wood and eliminated the possibility of warping. The other benefit of painting the exterior pieces before assembling is that the paint around the edges and inside window cut outs is smoothly finished before you apply the wallpaper. It gives me a nice finished look without any wet paint smudges on my wallpaper or window frames. After the house is assembled, I give the exterior another coat of paint, stucco, etc.

Back to our skylights now. After the wallpaper had dried, I installed the windows with the frames on the exterior. For the interior, I used strips of basswood to make my own frames. After the skylights were installed, the roof pieces were set aside on a flat surface to wait for assembly.

The other pieces of the roof were wallpapered at the same time. There is a trick to wallpapering gables prior to installation and I'll show you how that's done.

When the house is in dry fit, make a note in pencil to add 1/4" to 1/3" extra wallpaper in that area. Lay your roof piece on top of the wallpaper.

Trace the outline of the V shape on the paper with pencil, adding the additional space to the center.

These will be the lines you use to cut the wallpaper.

Paste the wallpaper onto the roof piece allowing the overlap of paper to extend to the inside of the V.

When the roof is installed and the gable pieces glued on, you'll have these flaps of wallpaper that will extend over the edges of the gable joins. All you'll have to do is apply a touch of glue to the underside with your finger, then smooth them down over the edges. We'll get to that in a few more steps when we start assembling.

With the tricky parts out of the way, the rest of the walls had the exterior painted and the wallpaper installed.