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Rosedale hardwoods and tiles

With the exterior (mostly) finished, I turned my attention to the Rosedale’s interior details, starting with hardwood floors.

I’d intended to use coffee stirrers like I did in the puzzle house but was concerned about them getting in the way of the front door, which fits right into the doorway without any extra clearance. Then I paid a visit to Peg’s Dollhouse, a quirky store in Sebastopol that was having a moving sale, and came home with a bunch of goodies including a package of LittleWonders Lumber. I’ve never seen this brand before but judging from the package it was pretty old.

The wood is nice and thin, so I decided to give it a try. I’ll probably still have to sand the door a little bit but it’s much better than the coffee stirrers would have been!

For the staggering price of $2, Peg sold me a package of teak lumber as well as some loose pieces that I initially thought were the same stuff and had just fallen out of the package. (More on this below.) I started with the loose pieces. They were already smooth and a nice reddish color, so I skipped sanding/staining and instead coated them with matte varnish to add a bit of a sheen.

The wood was easy to cut with scissors. I applied it using tacky glue. Goodbye, ugly floor crack!

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Puzzle Agent 2 previewed at Adventure Gamers

I’m not at E3, which is a relief to my feet and stomach and sanity, but I keep seeing all this exciting game news posted by people who are at E3 and wishing that I were there. I worked a couple of E3s doing Telltale’s PR but my fondest E3 memories are the two years I went with Adventure Gamers—a three-day whirlwind of press appointments and new game announcements and candy bar lunches followed by a day at Disneyland. Ahh, memories.

I did, however, get a chance earlier this week to play Telltale’s latest, Puzzle Agent 2 — which they’re showing to press at this very moment at E3 — and Adventure Gamers has just posted my hands-on impressions. So it’s almost sorta not really like I was at E3, if only for a brief moment. Okay, really not really. But regardless of where I played it, Puzzle Agent 2 promises to be a fun sequel, and if you like this type of thing you should go read all about it.

I still wish I were spending tomorrow at Disneyland though.

While we’re on the subject of Puzzle Agent, I’ll take advantage of YouTube’s handy embed feature to slip in two other movies that are sorta kinda related. This first one, The Smartest Dog in the World, is one of Puzzle Agent creator Graham Annable’s Grickle shorts, which tend to carry you along on a wave of tantalizing curiosity until unexpectedly delivering a stomach punch that leaves you asking, “Wait, was that funny or terrible?” Watch it, you’ll see.

And this one is a clever recreation of Graham’s The Hidden People (the short that inspired Puzzle Agent), which won the grand prize in Telltale’s Halloween contest last year. The human actors get the job done, but I’m most impressed by the dog. He just rolls with it.

Half-scale how-to: IKEA-inspired sofa and chair

I wanted a corner couch for my Rosedale’s second floor TV room, and unable to find any modern sectionals in half scale, I decided to make my own. IKEA furniture tends to have clean, straight lines—perfect for miniaturists like me, who don’t have the tools or the patience to get too fancy—so I checked out their website for possibilities.

The Karlstad corner sofa caught my eye, but it would be much too large for the Rosedale’s small room. I modified the design, coming up with my own dimensions to fit the space where I intended to use it. (Ironically, I ended up doing a standard couch rather than a sectional.) My few attempts at upholstery haven’t turned out so well and I thought if I tried to cover the sofa in fabric, it would be difficult to maintain the clean lines. Instead, I picked out neutral-colored scrapbook paper with a leather-like pattern.

After posting pictures of the result on the Greenleaf forum, a couple of people asked for a tutorial, so I made a complementary chair with fuzzy “suede” paper and took step-by-step pictures. I hope some fellow half-scalers find them useful!

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