FINALLY decorating!

It's been yeeaarrss!

I've finally started decorating the inside of the dolls house! I still have the front roof to make, attach and tile, but the rear roof is all tiled, so I was finally able to turn the house around and begin on the front!

I'd already ripped out most of the wallpaper and flooring in the attic rooms, so  it was just a case of getting rid of left over bits and sanding down.

I started with the flooring; strips of wooden effect sticky plastic. Cutting them to size, it was pretty easy to stick them all down so it looked like real wooden floor!

I then remembered I needed to paint the ceiling and probably wallpaper the walls before I laid down anymore flooring, just incase any paint landed on it! So, I covered the floor that was already down and painting the ceiling the same off-white as the inside of the dormer windows. 

I then wallpapered the walls. This piece of wallpaper took forever to measure correctly, so that it fit in to all the corners! 

After wallpapering the other wall (which was a lot easier!) I put the rest of the floor down, but was left with a little gap at the end! 

 I managed to cut a groove out of the strip of flooring so that it fit round the inner wall.

I'm quite pleased with how it turned out! I need to get a front roof soon, so that the floor doesn't fade in the light! 

Stripping!

I had the urge to do some DIY today so I sat in front of my house and started stripping wallpaper and flooring paper off in the attic.

This is what it looked like before. You can see the dark, mouldy patch where, somewhere along the line, we'd had a leak. It generally looked a bit dishevelled.

This was the stair case, minus the stair carpet that had been there, and the remnants of the old glue that stuck it down.

I managed to lift the staircase up quite easily by wedging a screw driver in the side and lifting it up. I was almost tempted to leave it and have it as a futuristic moveable staircase!! But, no...

This is the flooring that's going in. I think this'll probably go in every room apart from the kitchen where I'll have tiles. It's a cherry wood sticky flooring in strips that (I think) peel off a backing sheet and can be trimmed to size. There'll be more on this when it actually goes in!

Part way through the stripping process (below.) I'd planned on just doing the floor but the edge of the flooring paper was tucked under the bottom of the wallpaper where the wall and floor join. 

 I uncovered all the old wiring which was obviously copper and, over the years, had gone green. A lot of it was also pretty stuck down to the floor boarding and extraction may have to be finished another day!

I found this under some parts of the pink wallpaper - mainly on the middle section of the dividing wall. It's a green patterned wallpaper which looks like it only covered the bottom half of the wall and had white paint on the top half. It's as if my Granddad or Mum had started decorating like this then changed their minds and covered it all in pink wallpaper! Maybe mother could shed some light..?

So far, I've taken up almost all the flooring paper on both sides of the loft room and taken down 70% of the wallpaper. The wiring is going to take a lot of time I feel, as there are a lot of crossing over sections (as in the image below) and each joining part had a little metal peg in it (there were a few in the wall under the lights) which need to be pulled out with pliers. But at that point, I'd had no dinner and so left it for another day/time when I have more strength!

I think I'm going to get a little pot of white or off-white paint to repaint the ceiling and maybe inside the dormer windows and then I get to lay the flooring down!

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 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! 

Painting the Exterior

So, the Christmas madness has died down a little - more's the pity! But I'm still on my Christmas holidays so what better time to do a bit of renovation?

Now I have a few days to myself, since the boyfriend is back at work, I thought I'd get going on the painting of my house. 

I chose a Dulux standard emulsion colour tester pot in Muddy Puddle - £1 each from Wilkinson's! I bought 2 which was just enough for the whole outside of the house and the inside of the front facia. 

This is what the house looked like beforehand - I'd picked off as much of the old glue around the windows and doors as I could and sanded everything back to get a smoother starting point. 

 I also unscrewed the transformer from the back of the house and took the old copper conducting wire off the back. It was really easy to get off as it was just sticky-backed, so peeled off easily. 

The tester pots of paint came with a brush attached to the lid. It wasn't the best or smoothest of brushes, but it did the job and I figured that as the paint is meant to be cement, it didn't have to look pristine. 

So this the front of the house painted and dried. The colour did dry quite a lot lighter than when it was wet, but it pretty much matched the colour on the front of the pot so I'm sure it'll look good as cement. 

The house already looks much better than it did before and now I can't wait to get the bricks on it! Still need some spray mount first!