The Den of Slack

I planned to give the Seaside Villa a brick foundation. I bought this embossed brick paper back when I was going to paint the house Belgian Waffle. It would have looked good with that color scheme, but it’s too orange to go with the gray.

I dug around in my stash to see what else would work. These are Lemax bricks that I bought years ago the day after Christmas, at a deep discount. A little too fake looking. I considered painting them gray but it wasn’t really singing to me.

This is a leftover scrap of the paper I used for Sam & Max’s office. The color is great, but the scale is not (the paper is 1:12 scale and the Seaside Villa is 1:24 scale). This paper does come in half scale so I could have bought some of that, but I didn’t need anything else and didn’t want to pay more for shipping than the paper cost.

So I turned to the old standby: egg cartons. I don’t know who came up with the idea of using egg cartons for dollhouse stone, but I owe that person a debt of gratitude, because it’s one of my favorite techniques. I’ve used egg cartons to make a stone foundation for the Hillside Victorian, the foundation and chimney on the Queen Anne Rowhouse (pictured below), a fireplace, a wishing well, and probably other things I’m forgetting.

Egg cartons can also be used to make bricks — I really liked how this turned out in my Four Seasons Roombox. (The “concrete” stoop is also made from pieces of egg carton.)

But cutting and applying those tiny bricks is really tedious, especially in half scale. Back in 2015 (!) I started putting egg carton brick on the Victorianna’s foundation and I still haven’t finished it.

So, stone it is, but I didn’t want it to look exactly the same as the Rowhouse’s foundation. I Googled “stacked stone foundation” and found this website with some pictures. I decided to try something similar to the fully pitched Scotch bond. I cut a couple of egg carton lids into 1/2″ wide strips, and then cut these into 1/2″ and 3/4″ pieces.

These will be staggered to look something like this.

I’d neglected to paint the bottom edges of the walls when I did the rest of the house, so I did that first.

With the house on its side I realized I had not done a good job of painting the undersides of the lap siding when I painted over the Belgian Waffle with gray. You can’t see it when the house is upright, but I took this opportunity to touch it up.

Next I painted the stone part of the foundation with gray paint (Granite Gray from Glidden), and under the porch with black (this will get lattice instead of stone).

When the paint was dry, I glued on the egg carton stones, leaving small cracks between them. I snipped off the corners on the stones, which makes them look more like stones and less like pieces of cut-up cardboard.

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