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Bay window embellishments

When we last saw the Queen Anne Rowhouse, she was wearing a big green stripe that wasn’t exactly flattering. (You know what they say about horizontal stripes…) Today I turned this into three self-contained panels. This was a simple matter of cutting a few more vertical trim pieces, and cutting the corners of the horizontal pieces into 45-degree angles.

I painted the new pieces and glued them all on.

Chair rail might not have been the best choice for these, because the rounded trim didn’t meet nicely at the corners. I masked off the pieces and used wood filler to fill in the cracks at the corners, and where the panels met each other.

Then painted the filled parts, being careful not to get paint where it didn’t belong…

And voila, three panels! I like it!

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Queen Anne Rowhouse: painting the lady

While I’m waiting for my new lights to arrive, I’ve gone back to work on the front of the rowhouse. I want this to look more or less like a San Francisco painted lady, and at the beginning of this project I spent a lot of time poring over library books to get ideas for how I could decorate the front of the house.

First up: windows. I’m using two window styles, a traditional window with a crown molding-like pediment on the bay window, and bonnet pediment windows everywhere else. Here they are during painting… that’s a lot of painting!

I can’t really complain, because painting these is much quicker than 1:12 windows and the acrylic is removable, so I don’t dread it as much as on certain other projects that will remain nameless…

Here’s the front of the house with the windows in. Pretty, but awfully plain compared to a real painted lady.

I got some floral resin molding to use on the eaves of the house. I tried painting the flowers and vines, similar to how I did the resin molding on the porch, but didn’t like how it was turning out. So I decided to paint the whole piece with Olivewood and be done with it.

Originally I only planned to use two pieces of molding, but decided to add a third piece at the bottom. Here’s the basic idea (with the new piece not painted yet!)

And I used the same trim around the bottom of the bay, being careful to match up the design at the seams.

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Cir-Kit half scale lights, and the sadness they caused me

Progress on the Queen Anne Rowhouse has been somewhat stymied by one disaster after another with the electricity. On October 3, I ordered eleven half scale lights from Swan House DIY for a cost of about $130. (They didn’t show up until Halloween, but that’s a story for another time.) Of these, four were Houseworks brand and the rest were Cir-Kit brand. Houseworks and Cir-Kit offer almost the exact same lights and in these cases I chose the Cir-Kit because I liked the designs a little better.


Two similar lights (Cir-Kit on the left, Houseworks on the right). I liked the base better
on the Cir-Kit light, so I picked that one.

I’m not a big fan of the shiny brass that comes on pretty much every miniature light fixture, so the first thing I did was attempt to paint them all flat black to look like cast iron. But the paint didn’t want to adhere to the shiny finish on the lights and scraped right off. After painting most of my lights this way, I scraped off all the paint (pretty easily!) and scratched up the surfaces with a nail file.

I then painted on a coat of Gesso for the paint to stick to.

And then finally painted them black again and added a coat of matte varnish for protection. The paint still scrapes off if I’m not careful, but after devoting several hours to this process, I was ready to move on.

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