Perils of Maggie

[rockingrammy]

2 months into my first dollhouse...The Pierce... and I've learned a lot but still have so many questions. The first month I cut out the kitchen floor from a latex sheet backwards. Last night,(I guess I was sleepy) I actually wallpapered and neatly put baseboards on a small section on the OUTSIDE of the house. You do have to be alert. I looked at it this morning and immediately knew I'd have some removal to do today. Once you do the dry construction with masking tape and disassemble the home...I'm a little hazy on the order of construction. I know the windows go on after the wallpaper. What's the best time to add the baseboards and the crown moldings? Does it work better if you do all the wallpapered walls at once , or as you go along? What are people using to cover the outside open corners of all the walls? Also, the interior edges of the kitchen door are ugly. What type of trim are people using to cover. (I'm not adding a door so it looks nasty.) Thanks for any tips.

[havanaholly]

2 months into my first dollhouse...The Pierce... and I've learned a lot but still have so many questions. The first month I cut out the kitchen floor from a latex sheet backwards. Last night,(I guess I was sleepy) I actually wallpapered and neatly put baseboards on a small section on the OUTSIDE of the house. You do have to be alert. I looked at it this morning and immediately knew I'd have some removal to do today. Once you do the dry construction with masking tape and disassemble the home...I'm a little hazy on the order of construction. I know the windows go on after the wallpaper. What's the best time to add the baseboards and the crown moldings? Does it work better if you do all the wallpapered walls at once , or as you go along? What are people using to cover the outside open corners of all the walls? Also, the interior edges of the kitchen door are ugly. What type of trim are people using to cover. (I'm not adding a door so it looks nasty.) Thanks for any tips.

Talk about senior brain f**t! At first I thought you were referring to the Magnolia kit!

Order of construction? I usually do baseboards & crown moldings last of all, after the windows & doors & their trims, and drapes or curtains & all the other wall treatments I might possibly ever do.

I begin with scribing or priming the floors, once I decide how I want to do them, and stain them & finish them; and prime the ceilings. If it's a hallway or somewhere I'd need the shrinking machine to get to afterwards I decorate first, grabbing those bits first thing after the dry-fit. I may put it all back into dry-fit to check how it looks (and, after the Cambridge disaster, to make sure I haven't decorated the wrong side of an interior wall; don't ask, I'll never tell!). Then I start with the foundation or whatever starts with plywood Sheet #1 and build the shell, then prime, then decorate.

Why not put in a kitchen door? Doors are easy to make and so are the frames that go around them.

I usually smear the edges with spackling compound (what else?) if I'm not going to do anything else to them, but there's no reason you couldn't glue on piping cord or very narrow satin ribbon or soutache braid or whatever grabs you, and then paint over it when it's dry, if you wish.

Depending on what all goes on the outside I may switch back & forth between decorating & finishing the interior & exterior. I don't even think about window treatments (unless they scream at me while I'm building, as began happening with the Coventry Cottage & the McKinley) until after all else is done.

[chesterfieldzoo]

I used to make a list of how I wanted to finish a house. That way I had a game plan (like paint before flooring, install windows after wallpaper but before siding) I use a lot of the same techniques in dollhouses as I do in my real house. I buy narrow balsa wood (or pine) for trimming edges of doors and then use fluted trim in the room around each door. I prefer to do one room at a time and paint the ceiling, then the walls, then install flooring, then trim. Some houses you have to paint or wallpaper before assembly though because of the design.