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The Midas touch

King Midas got his hands on the Hillside Victorian today. But first, I finished up the front door. This morning I bought a piece of strip wood that’s the same width as the blue stripes on the windows. (It pays to have a miniature store in the neighborhood!)

And here’s the end result. The shoulder thingies could stand to be a bit longer to match up better with the windows, but I think it turned out pretty good for something that was cobbled together.

The other thing I’ve been working on for the past few weeks, which only started looking impressive today, are pieces of trim to cover up the paint mess where two colors meet. I’m using small crown molding at the edges of the white panels on the bay windows. (Actually, it’s “picture frame,” but it’s essentially the same thing as crown molding.) This creates a nice clean line and gives the house’s relatively plain trim a little oomph.

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Pretty windows, pretty door

As I’ve mentioned numerous times I’m not a fan of detail work, but the Hillside Victorian is just screaming out for Victorian details, and who am I to refuse?

Most of the windows on this house are Houseworks Victorian windows, and I’m painting accent colors similar to how I did the Fairfield’s windows. At 1:12, these are somewhat easier to paint neatly than the half scale windows were, but they still take a while… two coats of white, then two coats of the blue with a small chisel brush, then another round (or two) of white touch-ups to fix where the blue got outside the lines. I’ve only done these two so far.

And here they are on the house. (Here’s a close-up shot.) Two down, eight to go!

Because most of the Hillside Victorian’s windows have the Victorian pediment, I wanted the front door to match. Houseworks sells a Victorian style door (I have it on the Fairfield), but the house came with a nice old door with an etched glass window (upside-down in this picture!) that I wanted to use. Also, if I’d bought the Victorian door, the hole would have needed to be enlarged, and that would have been too tricky to reach with the porch and railing already glued in.

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My dog, the superstar

A brief video taken on graduation day of Small Dogs Wanna Have Fun, a 6-week class Rosy recently attended at the Marin Humane Society.

(Warning: I suggest muting the sound. My “you can do it!” voice is embarrassingly squeaky.)

This class, which we also took about a year ago, is basically an excuse for a bunch of small dogs to play on equipment and learn parlor tricks. But it’s also a great confidence builder, especially for dogs like mine who 1) are smaller than almost every other dog she meets, and 2) is afraid of almost every dog, small child, tall grown-up, and inanimate object she meets.

Of course, after last summer’s agility classes, Rosy the wonder greyhuahua chihuahua / English Springer Spaniel mix is an old pro on the equipment. She really doesn’t like things that wobble under her feet, though… which is why the video starts with her putting just one paw on that blue bobbly thing rather than balancing with all four (which about half of the dogs in the class were willing to do). Eh, we can’t all be superstars all the time.

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