Third day on this rehab and it’s looking good! Took me about an hour and a half to paint the whole house.

I’m using light blue paint that I’ve had for several years, and it was very thick when I first opened it, as if a lot of the water had evaporated since the last time I used it. Might not have been fully sealed. Geoff helped out, first stirring it with his drill attachment, then adding water until the consistency was closer to how paint should be.

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Not only is this house much larger than I’m used to, it’s also much heavier. I’m used to light little half scale houses that I could toss in the air if I wanted to. After a second day of fighting with the siding on this behemoth, my hands and arms are covered with scratches and my muscles are actually sore. Score one for the dollhouse.

Having decided I’m definitely not going to add the garage, the first thing I did today was remove the siding at the bottom of that side of the house so I could replace it. When liberating the little room, if I had approached it differently and scored the siding right at the edge of the room, this wouldn’t have been necessary. But thinking I’d be adding the garage and this would become an interior wall, I removed a few inches too much. Joining up two pieces of siding looks bad so I decided to take it all off and redo it.

These pieces were glued better than the ones I took off yesterday and I ended up pulling off some of the outer layer of plywood along with them.

Next I cut and glued on new pieces. Luckily I had just enough siding left over from the Westville to cover this area. Unluckily, it’s much harder to glue siding onto a house that can’t be turned onto its side (damn you, gravity!) After a bit of comedy I managed to get the pieces held in place. I also fixed a couple of loose spots higher up on the wall.

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Almost two years ago, I bought a HUGE 1:12 house off Craigslist for $150. It’s been sitting untouched ever since. I wanted to start a new project with the new year, and even though I have some other half scale kits in the wings, I had the urge to dust off this baby instead. The house is already built, sided, and shingled, and once I slap some paint on it, it’ll be more or less finished. Right? (Ahh, the optimism January brings…)

The first step was pulling it out of my relatively small workshop, where it’s been sitting on a wheeled dolly leftover from Geoff’s airplane building days, and into the garage where I would actually have some space to work on it. I’m not sure how long Geoff will tolerate it staying in the garage so I have to move quickly!

A lot of the siding is coming up at the edges, so fixing that is one of the first orders of business.

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