The Den of Slack

Here’s where we left off last week:

Two things were bugging me. One was that gold trim on the front edge of the porch roof. For some reason I had thought it would be MUCH easier to paint the edge of the porch blue, since the surfaces were also blue. But as soon as I saw that gold trim up there I knew the blue andmsl the gold had to be the other way around. The other was the gold corbels over the fishscale shingles, but I had decided to let those sit to see if they grew on me.

Ripping the gold trim off was easy. I painted over the edge with gold, which only took one coat.

Painting over the gold trim was a little more difficult. It has a grainy texture and even with a few coats it seems more muted than other blue elements. But I think it looks much classier this way. After gluing it on, I went over the top and bottom edge to cover up the little bit of gold that was showing at the seam (which of course turned out to be way less work than painting these twice was).

Next I masked off the quarter round at the bottom of the bay window and filled in the gaps to paint over them.

And somehow I hadn’t noticed these huge gaps in the crown molding I glued over the entry peak.

Wood filler to the rescue!

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The front of the Turret House has a patch of fishscale shingles that I wasn’t sure what to do with. They’re neatly applied, but the sides need some sort of trim. I’m sure whoever put this house together had a vision for how to finish this area but without knowing what they intended, I had to improvise.

I thought about adding porch posts, but the one on the right interferes with the window.

A Tiny Turnings stick worked a little better, but I didn’t really like the look of this (and it still bumped into the window).

The space on the right is only 3/16″ wide — not a standard trim size. I looked through my stash to see what I had that I could use, and found this running trim that I’d bought for the Victorianna and ended up not using. With the points cut off, it’s 3/16″.

And it’s thin enough that the window doesn’t bump it.

Here’s what I came up with.

As you can see, the paint is a bit rough at the bottom where I couldn’t get the paintbrush completely under the shingles.

I decided to cover the bottom edge with quarter round.

The cutouts on the modified roof trim gave me an opportunity to add more gold accents, so I painted the areas behind that trim gold before gluing it on.

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