Finishing the Exterior.

I've been meaning to finish the exterior of my house for a while now so I made myself get off the sofa today (it is the Easter holidays after all!), brought the house down to the kitchen table and got going!

I'd already painted the house and covered it in the brick compound from Bromley Craft Products. (Blog post Here.)
But the compound had dried with seams and varying gaps between the bricks! (This was due to the stencil getting clogged up with the re-positionable spray mount… annoying.)
So today I went over a few bits with the left over brick compound to fill in some of the gaps and also finished off some of the trickier bits without the stencil - using a trusty cocktail stick instead to create the outlines of the bricks to show the mortar beneath.

Next job was painting! I think I'd been putting this off as I was a bit apprehensive to start and get it wrong - then the paint's stuck there forever! So, I started on a fairly inconspicuous bit: the corner of the back of the house. It was a bit dodgy, but I then did the chimneys which I was pleased with; making the bricks look sooty and old.
I used acrylic paints in green, brown, black, white and a bit of red and yellow to create effects such as soot, moss, dirt, paint and general wear and tear.

Then the boyfriend came home and took over! Being an artist, he couldn't help himself and he actually made it look a lot more realistic. So together, we brushed on some more 'moss' and made the bricks dirty using an almost dry brush and dry-ish paint so as not to spread it on too thickly. By almost stippling the paint, we created what looks like moss and by brushing over a colour the same as the brick compound (apparently, one of the boy's strengths is mixing paint to match a colour!), the bricks look more realistically dirty instead of just splodged with black paint.

We then sanded down some of the paint work to make it look more distressed and weather-worn - another of the boy's ideas which, again, worked really well!

Here's what the house looked like after the painting and sanding.

I love these bricks, here! They really look like moss and lichen!

To varnish, I used Windsor and Newton's All Purpose Matt Varnish bought from Bromley Craft Products. It HAS to be Matt… houses aren't shiny! This was just a little can and I pretty much used up the whole thing with a good first coat and a thinner second coat of the whole house. 

I'm really pleased with how the house looks now! As you can see, I've painted the sides of the roof black which I think looks more realistic and much more dramatic. You can see the moss stippling here and the sooty, dirty look of the bricks. 

It is recommended that you use acrylic paint as its thick and goes on well, its blendable and works with the brick compound too. However, I found that the paint does have to be thick to dry: not watered down much at all as the compound is very absorbent and if too thin, the paint will find its way across bricks and seep into all the little gaps! 

I'm so pleased I've finally finished the exterior of my house! I can now get going on the inside which is the fun(ner) bit! I shall be going upstairs just to admire my house periodically from now on :)

Dormer Windows!

A little update tonight. I got some dolls' house things for Christmas last year: a new stair case, a front door (both of which will be varnished at some point) and 2 dormer windows for the roof!

They have lollypop stick style roof tiles so I will be buying some similar for the rest of the roof. Speaking of the rest of the roof: My new dormer windows are much smaller than the old ones so I will also have to replace the roof with a new piece of ply-wood and get some holes cut in it the right size for the new dormer windows! 

This is what they looked like after being painted and bricked. 

A close up on the pointed roof bricking: This space was way too small to fit the stencil into to stick and plaster over with the compound so I had to just plaster some compound into the space and, with a cocktail stick, scraped out the spaces in-between for the base colour to show through. The resulting 'bricks' are possibly slightly bigger than the stencil bricks, but with the compound sticking to the stencil, all the bricks seem to be difference sizes anyway, haha! 

I'm looking forward to my new roof 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! 

Bricking it: Part 2.

I have a week off work this week so I wanted to get on with some of my house. Although, the boy is ill in bed so I'm also looking after him! However, while he was asleep this afternoon, I snuck away to do some work.

I started applying my Realistic Brick Compound to the chimneys of the house as I wanted to start somewhere small and fairly inconspicuous just incase it went wrong and I had to wipe it all off...


This was what I started with; some repositionable spray mount, my brick compound, my brick stencil and a few tools like a mug and a knife.

The spray mount was Elmer's Repositionable Mounting Spray...and was quite hard to work with. It seemed to take a few sprays until the stencil would become sticky enough to stick first time and I think it stuck to me more than it stuck to the wood! 

I'm hoping it was partly due to the fact that the paint on the chimneys seemed not to have taken as well as to the rest of the house, so maybe it'll stick better when I brick the other walls! But I still have sticky fingers...which are now fluffy from washing and drying them! 

The brick compound looks like this; you add water to it to make into a paste, much the texture of wet sand. Smooth but spreadable and not runny. You barely needed any water for this mix. For maybe 2 teaspoons of powder you only need a few drops of water. It's very forgiving as well because you can add more water or more powder to get the consistency right and it stays wet for ages, but if it does start drying out, you can add a few more drops of water to bring it back to life. 

So the first step of stencilling was to spray the stencil (outside), wait 30 seconds or so, then stick the stencil onto the house, lining everything up - which takes a while! - and making sure all parts of the stencil are stuck down so the compound doesn't bleed underneath! As I said, this took a while as, even though I only sprayed one side of the stencil, it seemed to make both sides very sticky and then had a habit of sticking to me more than the house! At one point, I thought I might lose a layer of skin I was stuck so much!

Next, I spread some of the compound mixture over the stencil with a knife, making sure everything was covered and then smoothed it over. 

Peel the stencil away...

And you have bricks! 

This was the first part I did and I think they look Victorian/Edwardian already!

The effect is really good and I'm sure it'll look even more impressive once it's all covered; I only did the chimneys today and it took me an hour and a half to do that! It's a very fiddly task; the lining up of the stencil round corners etc. and getting the stencil to stick where you want it to takes time, but hopefully the next part will be easier as it'll be a wider, flatter surface and I can stencil large parts at a time.

That'll hopefully be tomorrow or the next day, before I travel down South to see the family, so hopefully I'll update soon! 

Demolition: Part 1

Today I ended up taking all the old brick effect paper off the exterior of the dolls' house. I'd been picking bits off it for a couple of weeks so finally decided to sit down and do it properly!

Taking the paper off the chimneys was the worst bit: I guess as it's solid wood the glue had set hard - the glue had also gone all mouldy which was a bit icky... 

I uncovered this writing though, which may well be my Granddad's handwriting - something I've never seen before, or don't remember ever seeing it. This is just labelling which chimney is for which side of the house.
You can also see the mould underneath the paper. Ew.  

I also took all the windows and doors off the front of the house and ended up with something that looks like this for now. 

Next step: Sanding and painting! 

Bricking it!

My first parcel for the house arrived yesterday!

I was excited to open it and see what everything looked like.

From Bromley Craft Products (http://www.craft-products.com) I bought a packet of Realistic Brick Compound in red brick, a can of clear matt spray varnish and a Stretcher Bond standard pattern brick stencil.

I'd never seen anything like this before and the finished effect - from pictures on their website - looks great and very realistic. Bromley Craft Products even has an application video and guide on their website  to show you exactly what to do. It looks pretty simple so I'm looking forward to starting!

I have brick effect paper on the house at the moment, so just had to spend a bit more money on this equipment to get what will hopefully be a much more realistic finish. 

Now, I just have to get myself some repositionable spray adhesive for fixing the stencil while its in use and some cement/mortar coloured normal emulsion paint to coat the outer walls before bricking them as that's the colour which will be visible through the bricks. 

Here goes!