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Victorianna — attaching the flat roof

Before I could glue in the Victorianna’s flat roof, I had to finish a few things in the master bedroom and bathroom that would be too hard to reach once the roof was on, starting with the bedroom closet.

As a reminder, here’s how the closet looks inside. You can read more about the creation of this closet here and here.

And here it is with the door on. Though the door opens and closes, it doesn’t close smoothly — it gets stuck halfway closed. To close it the rest of the way, I have been reaching down from above and holding on to the top of the closet with my fingers while pushing the door into a flat position with my thumb. I can’t do that once the ceiling is on, so this may well be the last we ever see of the inside of this closet.

On the other side of the wall, in the master bathroom, I added shelves to the shower. First I glued on these shampoo bottles and soap in a dish. I should have added labels first but I was impatient to get this done, and finding/resizing/printing labels seemed like a big chore at the time. (The lack of labels will probably annoy me forever…)

I glued in the top shelf first, with a spacer below it to hold it at the right height.

Then I glued in the bottom shelf the same way.

Done! In hindsight I wish I had added grout to the seams where the shower walls and floor meet each other. Oh well.

I also made a little towel holder to go near the sink. The round part is half of a toggle clasp. I stuck a head pin through the hole, with crimp beads on either side to keep the pin from slipping out. The towel is a piece of a baby washcloth from the dollar store.

I used the micro drill to make a hole in the side of the linen closet. (This would have been easier if I’d done it before I glued in the closet…)

Before gluing in the roof, I cut trim pieces to go over the door and around the linen closet. This would have been much harder to do with the ceiling in place.

I actually did all of this prep work almost a year ago, before packing up the Victorianna so Geoff could renovate my workshop. Now that the flat roof is ready, I can finally glue it on. I applied The Ultimate super glue to the tops of the walls and back roof.

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Victorianna – preparing the flat roof

Goal: I’m going to finish the Victorianna in 2020. I think I’ve said that for the past three years, but this time I mean it!

I haven’t really worked on the Victorianna since early 2019, when I finished the kitchen and updated the second floor bathroom. I packed it up when Geoff redid my workshop in March, and when I moved everything back into the workshop four months later, it was hard to get back into it.

After my October 2018 post about shingles, I continued shingling the front and started the back. I was getting to the point where I needed to attach the roof. And this is when things got complicated.

Normally the Victorianna (which is a long-discontinued half scale version of Greenleaf’s McKinley) has two gables in the attic, with the roof sloping down between them.

I modified it to make the center portion flat. This makes the third floor space more usable. I have a master bedroom on one side, and a master bathroom and nursery on the other side.


With the roof pieces in place, the rooms are pretty dark, so I decided to add skylights. The smaller ones on the sloped roof are hinged windows from Miniatures.com and the big ones are large cottage windows from Dollshouse Emporium.

I made the sloped part of the roof from a piece of basswood (same thickness as the kit wood) and Geoff cut the larger piece out of 1/4″ plywood. I can’t remember why we used that size, maybe just because it’s what we had.

I planned all of this out back in 2017 and although I wasn’t exactly sure how the pieces would fit together, I figured I’d make it work when the time came. But as I progressed with the shingles, I started anticipating problems.

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Kashkuli Gabbeh petit point carpet

This is a carpet I charted myself, based on a photo I found online. I’m planning to post the chart for download but I want to tweak a few colors first. I’m going to make a smaller version to try out the corrections and then I’ll make both charts available for free (for personal use only).

A couple of years ago I made a safari nursery rug based on real rug, but the Kashkuli Gabbeh is a lot more complicated! I was surprised I couldn’t find any how-to articles online for how to convert a carpet picture into petit point, so I’ll walk through the steps here, as best as I can remember (I charted it about five months ago).

This Kashkuli Gabbeh rug happens to be one I had my eye on for my real life house but didn’t end up buying. I thought the different bands in the center would be fun to do in petit point. I like stitching rugs that have a lot of different motifs, to keep things interesting. Along these lines, I’ve already stitched two Bakhtiari carpets (one designed by Sue Resseguie and the other by Lucy Iducovich), but one can only have so many Bakhtiaris!

Here is the picture I adapted.

I started by shrinking it down to 199 x 307 pixels. I think I used Photoshop’s Bicubic Sharper setting when I reduced it, but it might have been regular Bicubic. One pixel is equivalent to one stitch, so this comes to about 5″ x 7.5″ on 40-count.

In hindsight I have no idea why I chose this size. I knew I would be stitching it on 40-count so it might have been as simple as wanting a size that could work in half scale. But then why didn’t I make it 200 pixels wide? Due to my lack of note-taking, we’ll never know.

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