Monday 12 August 2013

Update: The roof

As its been 6 months since my last post, I thought I'd treat you to 2 in one day!

Just thought I'd do a little update on the house...

I've now emptied anything that moves from inside the house. There are still a few pictures up and lights etc where the wires are behind wallpaper or underneath carpet... a job for another day. 


Today I've taken off the front of the card roof tiles. Still needs some cleaning before I can apply the new ones. Lots of glue still sticking on! I'm also looking into getting some pitched roof dormer windows for the loft room with some nice wooden windows. 

I might go and tempt myself to dolls house stuff online now... 

Bricking it: Part 3. A bit belated...

Oh my god, I haven't posted here for 6 months! And I never posted part 3 of bricking up my house.
Sorry I've been so...not here. In the last 6 months, I've moved house - again. We're now in our own lovely 200 year old cottage in the old part of town, which is beautiful for a nice walk and we often go and sit in the park across the road for a Sunday picnic!
I've also got myself an internship to carry out while I'm on Summer holidays from my school job which is going well, so I've been quite busy...!

Anyway, I've now applied the Realistic Brick Compound to the rest of the house, but I think it still needs tweaking and I may even need to wipe some parts off and do them again (I just hope I have enough compound left. I'll also need to bring the house downstairs to the dining room table..!)

This is the side and back of the house, mostly covered. You have to line up the bricks to make sure they look like they've been laid on a corner, but that's pretty easy to do. As my house is already built, it was a bit more fiddly to get right to the top or bottom instead of being able to lay the separate pieces on a flat surface and cover them like that. 



This is an example of one of the 'seams' that appeared as I was covering my house. The instructions say that you don't have to let the compound dry before laying the stencil on top and covering the next part of the house. However, when I did this, the compound kind of stuck to itself and gave me these pronounced seams. I think it should be ok to fix... just needs a sand down I should imagine. 

This was the other problem I encountered, which may be more difficult to fix. Combining the compound and the spray mount, both on the stencil, the compound ended up sticking to the mount on the stencil which diminished the size of the individual bricks. That meant that while I started (with a clean stencil) with evenly sized bricks, with use, the bricks became clogged up with the sticky compound which then made the spaces between the bricks thicker...giving a slightly uneven look to the brick work.

I'm hoping that with a good clean of the stencil (even though it was cleaned throughout stencilling) and a re-applying of some of the bricks, that it might solve the problem... We shall see. 

After that's done, I'll be adding weathered effects to the bricks - more research to be done on that first though. Then I can varnish!