The Den of Slack

While I was working on the nursery floor, I was messing with the pin hinges in the door and accidentally poked the bottom pin through the front of the door, mangling the hole beyond repair. (Hence the chip in the paint.) So before I could continue with the nursery walls, I had to make another door. Two steps forward, one step back with this house.

These doors are made from oval light doors that used to be available on Real Good Toys’ website, but no longer are. This post shows how I make them.

The first door was in a frame I’d made myself out of strip wood. To mitigate future pin-hinging catastrophes, I decided to pull off those pieces and instead use the frame that came with the door — that way the hole and pin at the top were guaranteed to line up. I cut off the threshold at the bottom to hinge the door directly into a floorboard.

The frame is deeper than my strip wood pieces were, so it sticks out in the back. I used the pieces I’d just pulled out of the frame as shims.

The foamcore was getting beat up from all of my messing with it. I covered it with scrapbook paper to have a smooth surface to glue wallpaper to.

Next I painted the new door and the frame.

And now I was ready to wallpaper. I’d picked this paper out when I started working on the nursery last summer.

Since then, I’d bought this 1:12 Bradbury & Bradbury wallpaper from Miniatures.com, and I was tempted to use it instead.

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With the kitchen electrical finished, I can now lay the floors in the nursery upstairs. The wires from the kitchen lights come up through the floor. My original idea was to leave a slight gap at the sides for the wires to sit in and cover that gap with baseboards.

But when I started playing with it, I found the white wire coming from the middle of the room was too bulky for the floorboards to lay flat on top of it. On to Plan B: a subfloor made of cardboard.

And then I noticed that the bathroom wall isn’t quite flush at the bottom. The front edge of the cardboard needs to be covered with a piece of trim anyway, so I thought about extending the trim piece all the way across the gap at the front of the wall. But this would have been inconsistent with the other walls and would probably look weird.

The wall is flush at the top, but the bathroom wallpaper sticks out a bit, which also bugged me.

I decided to kill two birds with one stone (sorry, birds!) by adding a piece of thin basswood to the front edge of the wall. This mostly gets rid of the gap at the bottom.

And it takes care of the sticking-out wallpaper at the top.

I used the belt sander to make the back of the basswood piece thinner at the top, so it won’t stick out quite as much where it meets the trim piece above. It still does stick out a little, but it’s is less egregious than the gap at the bottom was.

While the paint on that new wall piece was drying, I glued the cardboard to the floor. It’s spaced slightly away from the front edge to accommodate the piece of trim that will hide the edge of the cardboard.

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