The Den of Slack

Approximately 1,931 days after I started working on it and a good fifteen years after I started thinking about it, I can officially report that the back-to-back Victorianna bash is done!

Okay, not 100% done. I don’t have furniture for all of the rooms yet, but the house itself is finished, and it’s a good thing, because I’m moving to a new 1:1 house and I did not want to move this dollhouse-in-progress again.

After finishing the shingles and foundation, the last thing to do was to cover the exposed plywood edges with trim. This gives the house a clean, finished look.

One last room needed crown molding and baseboard — the room off the living room that I’m not sure what to do with. (Office? Music room? Craft room?)

I’m not sure if I ever posted a picture of the back door — this is a Houseworks Traditional 4-Panel Exterior Door. I have a love/hate relationship with this style of door — I love the transom at the top, but I hate the door itself, which has four raised panels on the front and is completely flat on the back. I added strip wood to the flat side to dress it up.

This is the same Craftsman style as the fake closet under the stairs, which is barely visible. I really like how this looks, and it’s easy to do with scrap wood. In my next house I might scratch build doors that look like this… I’m kind of over the standard Houseworks doors.

A while ago I set aside my last piece of baseboard (which is 1:12 chair rail that’s discontinued and impossible to find), but when it came time to finish this room I couldn’t find it anywhere. I dug through my scrap drawer and found a partial piece that had been stained, but it wasn’t big enough to do the whole room.

I went down a rabbit hole of making built-in cabinets along the back wall so I wouldn’t need to use baseboard there, but thankfully found the piece of baseboard before I glued anything in. Here’s the last room, finished!

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Here’s another post that’s been a long time coming! I started shingling the Victorianna back in October 2018. I’m using Greenleaf’s octagon speed shingle strips, with a couple of rows of diamond shingles mixed in.

(Speaking of Greenleaf, after a much longer than anticipated delay for maintenance, their forum is back up!)

Here’s where I left off with the shingles:

The diamond shingles were leftover from the Rosedale and the first ones I applied had a yellowish tint. At first I thought they were all like this, but some strips stained darker.

I applied another coat of stain, which made them all a more uniform color. This is water-based stain, so the glue spots don’t stand out like they would with oil-based stain.

Once I worked my way up to the point where the shingles could run behind the towers, I moved on to the sides.

By this point I was using hot glue, but for the first several rows of shingles I’d used The Ultimate white glue, and some of them just didn’t want to stick. I tried adding more glue and clamping them down.

It helped some, but a few stubborn shingles just won’t lie flat. Oh well. Let’s pretend it’s an old roof on an old house.

Here you can really see the difference between the shingles that only got one coat of stain, versus the ones in the center that got a second coat of stain. I stopped here to attach the roof.

I got this far up the back before putting the shingles aside for 18 months…

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