Since my Hillside Victorian came with a French door added to the first floor, I decided to put in a deck. The room just inside that door is the master bedroom so I thought a private deck with hot tub would be nice.
My local dollhouse shop used to stock a Betty’s Wooden Miniatures deck kit with a built-in hot tub that seems to have been discontinued a long time ago. At some point they sold out of the kit with the hot tub and all they had left was a version without the hot tub. So, I bought a separate hot tub kit with the plan of bashing it into the deck. I’ll cover the hot tub kit now, and the deck itself in a later post.
The kit is MBS brand and it’s available at Miniatures.com. I’ll start by saying that at $40, this is a pricy kit considering what you get. It’s all plastic, even the “wood.” If I’d known that I might not have bought it. The Miniatures.com description does refer to plastic siding but I didn’t make the connection. The kit comes with instructions for making the plastic look like wood, but it’s a labor intensive process… much more so than staining would have been.
The tub itself is a molded piece of plastic that looks more or less like a hot tub. They recommend painting the underside, so the paint shows through under a nice shiny finish. This would be easy-peasy with a solid color, but for “marbling” it’s problematic since you can’t keep covering up and blending until you get the effect you want… you’re pretty much stuck with whatever you paint first showing up as the top layer.
Throwing caution to the wind, I started with splotches of white and light blue, applied with an almost-dry toothbrush. After taking the photo above I added some gold, just for kicks.
Emily is a freelance writer, miniaturist, and adventure game enthusiast.
