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Mansard Victorian bathroom – finally coming together

Fourteen months after I started the Mansard Victorian’s bathroom by kitbashing Cassidy Creations kits into a linen closet, I’ve finally hit the home stretch with this little room.

Something that was holding me up was my indecision over whether I should finish the area behind the bathroom door. The door is set in a false wall, with wiring accessible behind it.

The bathroom wall has more space behind it than the bedrooms will (because I didn’t need such a long skinny room, and to accommodate the built-in linen closet), so I thought I should make it look like a hallway back there.

I started this process months ago by cutting hardwood floor pieces to go in that space. As I was doing this, I realized I couldn’t live with the threshold, which I’d stained hoping it would blend in with the flooring. I just didn’t like how it looked and wanted a seamless transition like the kitchen door has.

The door was already glued into the false wall at this point, so I couldn’t do much to modify it, but I was able to remove the threshold and replace it with a piece of flooring. Since the flooring piece was skinnier than the threshold, this resulted in a big gap (and visible pin hinge) at the top of the door.

(Since taking that picture, I’ve filled in and painted over those big cracks at the corners!)

I stacked two floor pieces together to make the threshold taller.

The new threshold is glued to the trim on each side, just barely, but once it’s glued into the house it won’t go anywhere. I put a tiny piece of Scotch tape over the pinhead to keep it from falling out in the meantime.

I cut a piece of the wallpaper I used downstairs and glued it to the back wall. There will be an outlet in this space that the two bathroom lights plug into, attached to a power strip on the outside back of the house. The hole is for the outlet’s wire to go through (it’s so big because I didn’t want to remove the plug from the wire).

When I glued in the flooring pieces a couple weeks ago, it had been so long since I cut them I couldn’t remember why two of them were longer. I assumed since you can’t really see back there that I had just been haphazard about it. (You know what they say about assuming…)

It looked fine head-on. But when I put the side walls in and looked through at an angle, I was able to tell that the floorboards stopped before they were supposed to. Oops – I guess that’s where those two longer boards were supposed to go!

The right thing to do in this situation would have been to take a deep breath, maybe sleep on it, and come to the conclusion that it really didn’t matter, it was barely visible, nobody cares, etc.

The wrong thing to do in this situation was this:

Silly me, I thought the floorboards would pry up easily. They did not. This was the best I was able to do. Argh.

Cardboard to the rescue!

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Mansard Victorian – bathroom electricity

Multiple people have asked me recently what I’m working on mini-wise, and I’ve said I’m working on nothing, and it’s because of Daisy.

She’s around 17 months old now (the vet actually adjusted her age a few months younger than we thought she was), and she’s doing well with training, but she still has a lot of mischievous puppy energy, as well as separation anxiety when she’s apart from me.

I can leave her in her crate for a few hours here and there, but I’m finishing up a novel revision/rewrite that’s taken much longer than I wanted it to, so I’ve been prioritizing Daisy’s crate time for trips to the coffee shop to write. If I try to bring her into the workshop, and tie her up or crate her, she barks and acts bratty because she wants to be free to roam around. As long as she’s full of mischievous puppy energy, that’s just not going to happen.

Anyway, that’s my long-winded way of saying I’m annoyed the Mansard Victorian’s bathroom has taken so long (over a year now!), and I’m annoyed that every time I do have a little time to work on it, I don’t even know where to start because I’ve made the putting-together of this room excruciatingly complicated.

This is a front-opening house with a solid back. I’m adding false walls at the backs of the rooms to give the illusion that there’s a hallway behind them, and hiding wiring and power outlets behind the doors.

Wires attached to the outlets then go through a hole in the back wall.

And they come out the back side, where they plug into a power strip. I’m making the holes big enough for the plug to fit through, so I don’t have to remove and reattach the plugs.

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Windsor chairs by William Clinger

I was recently trolling eBay, as I far too frequently do, and came across an auction for a half scale bed and two Windsor chairs for $23 Buy It Now.

The bed was meh, but those chairs looked suspiciously like William Clinger chairs. Even if they weren’t, they looked nice enough to take a chance on. So I did.

About a year and a half ago I got a good deal on two Clinger chairs at Auntie Em’s Miniatures in Arizona — $35 for the one on the left and $40 for the one on the right.

When my eBay gamble arrived I eagerly flipped over the chairs to look for a signature, and yes, they’re William Clinger! Honestly, I had forgotten when I bought these that I already had a matching one.

Now that I almost had a full set, could I possibly find one more? Why, yes, there happened to be one on Etsy for $69.95.

Still glowing from the high of getting two of these beauties for just $23, I was hesitant to buy the expensive one. But then I did the math: (23 + 35 + 70)/4 = $32 per chair. That’s still a good deal! Especially considering there’s a similar set on eBay right now listed at $480. Of course, list price isn’t the same as sold price, but it makes me feel good about my finds. (I’m saving a pic of the eBay chairs here for when that auction isn’t there anymore…)

While I was waiting for my fourth chair to arrive, I pulled out a table kit I’ve been hanging on to for awhile.

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