You’d think that having just finished the Rowhouse shingles I wouldn’t be itching to shingle another dollhouse — and you’d be right! — but the roof is one of the last remaining tasks on the Victorianna, and I want to get this house finished.

To refresh your memory, here’s the outside of the house:

The roof is the last remaining evidence that this house started out as two separate kits. Not for long!

I’m using Greenleaf’s octagon speed shingles for this house, so it will theoretically go faster than the one-shingle-at-a-time Rowhouse did. I’d been planning to use Minwax Classic Gray, which came out a pretty blue/gray color on the Houseworks shingles I used for the Gull Bay, but they looked very yellow on the speed shingles (the strip on the bottom). Instead I decided to go with gray water based stain (also Minwax). Since it’s water based, the shingle strips curl up, but they flatten out as they dry.

Before I could start gluing on shingles, I had to tweak the bottom of the roof. It comes down in a straight line beside the towers. That would be fine, except that when I cut the siding for the tower walls I cut the sides at too much of an angle, thinking I could just cover it up with shingles.

To cover that up, I need the roof to curve around the tower rather than meeting it with a straight edge. I folded a piece of paper around where the curve should be, and cut it out.

I used the paper as a guide to cut the shape out of scrap basswood.

I glued in the pieces. The basswood is not as thick as the roof – it wouldn’t have fit because the crown molding would get in the way.

Normally I would leave the bottom edge of a roof alone, but this is looking pretty janky. My two Victorianna kits were two different types of wood (birch plywood on the left and luan plywood on the right) — I stained them both with the Minwax Classic Gray but they look totally different. And then the little pieces at the end are obviously tacked on.

I glued on a row of shingles on with the shingles facing up, so the plain wood will cover up the gaps between the first row of shingles. Then I added a piece of stained basswood to the bottom edge of the roof to make it look uniform.

I’m leaving a 1/4″ gap between the rows. I used a piece of 1/4″ strip wood to measure it.

Each shingle strip is 4.5″ long and this portion of the roof is about 6″. These initial rows were tricky, because I both had to cut the angle correctly against the tower and make sure the two strips met up correctly.

Here are the first six rows. I used The Ultimate glue for these, just doing two strips at a time and taping them down to dry in between. It was slow going, and some near the bottom didn’t stick as well as I wanted (the top is fine but the bottom of the shingle is lifted up).

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