The Queen Anne Rowhouse is my first dollhouse with hinged panels, and all along I’ve been fretting about how to handle them. When I got the house it had shiny brass hinges that were very obvious and the screws didn’t all match, which I hated. I bought some antiqued brass hinges to replace them with — same size, but slightly classier.

I’m at the point where the panels need to go back on, and I started with the roof.

Looks great from the top, but underneath the screws stick through.

Geoff helped me sand them down with the belt sander.

Much better! And although I originally planned to leave the underside of the roof stained, I decided to paint it house colored instead, so these little nubs have been covered up completely.

The wall panels have siding so they’re thicker than the roof, and I planned to put basswood trim pieces at the edges to cover up the not-completely-straight edges of the siding, like so. The hinges would then sit on top of these trim pieces, fully visible.

The trim added just enough depth to allow the screw to fit without sticking out the other side.

After gluing on the trim, I used woodfiller to fill in the gaps where it met the siding.

This made for a nice smooth edge.

Then my parents came to visit, and when I showed my dad what I planned to do he suggested setting the hinges on the inner edge so they’d be hidden. I was apprehensive about doing it this way and having it look neat but liked the idea of the hinges being as unobtrusive as possible. So we decided to try it.

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The Queen Anne rowhouse is very close to finished, and we’ve entered what I think of as the “bits and pieces” phase—there’s lots of fiddly trim work left to do, and I tend to be lazy about doing it. (The Rosedale has been languishing in this state for two years!) All summer, I was putting off finishing baseboards because the dollhouse store was out of stock on the 1:12 window casing I’m using for baseboards. Or so I thought… it turned out I was looking in the wrong bin. Or maybe my brain was trying to psyche me out because I didn’t want to finish baseboards.

One of the remaining spots was here in the office. There was a crack in the flooring that I thought would be covered up by baseboard, but I was wrong.

I fixed it by cramming in several pieces of very skinny basswood. I didn’t even use glue, but they’re packed in there pretty tight, so I think they’ll stay put.

The foyer was another room that was waiting on a few pieces of baseboard, and I had to get these in before gluing in the stairs or I never would have been able to reach.

Gluing in the newel post was difficult. I got some super glue on the floor in my first attempt, which is annoying because there’s no way to reach in and sand it off. On my second try, using tacky glue and reaching in through the French door, I was able to hold it in place long enough for the glue to take.

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