{"id":19678,"date":"2023-03-18T17:54:58","date_gmt":"2023-03-19T00:54:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/?p=19678"},"modified":"2023-03-18T21:39:19","modified_gmt":"2023-03-19T04:39:19","slug":"mansard-victorian-brick-foundation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/?p=19678","title":{"rendered":"Mansard Victorian – egg carton brick foundation"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is my inspiration house for the Mansard Victorian. It’s the Emanuel Kahn mansion<\/a> in Salt Lake City, Utah (more pictures here<\/a>).<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I realize I’m setting myself up for a lot of tedious work with a brick exterior. When I did the Victorianna’s brick foundation<\/a>, it took so long that I swore I would never do egg carton bricks again. I’ve used brick paper<\/a> and Magic Brik<\/a> on roomboxes, but they don’t have the realism I want for this house. So, egg carton bricks it is.<\/p>\n

I’m ready to start finishing the interior, but first I need to cover up the front foundation piece, since I don’t want to be painting and grouting when the wallpaper and flooring is already in. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Before I got started, I turned the house on its back so I could see how much space there is between the front of the house and the foundation piece. I didn’t want the thickness of the bricks to prevent the front from standing up against the house.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Not only is there a gap, but the front piece is slightly bowed where I glued the two panels together<\/a>. I put a piece of egg carton material in to see how it fit, and there’s plenty of space for it.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I started by filling in the screw holes on the foundation piece with wood filler.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Then I painted the foundation piece and the front edges of the walls and ceiling. My bricks will be orange with gray trim, like in the inspiration picture, but I didn’t have the orange paint yet. I grabbed a gray off my paint shelf, knowing I could paint over it later if I needed to.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I cut several egg carton strips. The strips are 3\/8″ wide, and I then them into 1\/8″ pieces to make the bricks.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This is going to take a loooong time.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Each brick gets its corners clipped off with nail scissors before I glue it on.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This is how far I got the first weekend… back in January.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Little by little, I kept going, until last weekend when I finally finished. Slow and steady wins the race (or so I’ve heard).<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, I had gone to Home Depot and bought these paints for the bricks and trim. Why is the Moroccan sky orange, I wonder?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I’m planning to use this green a lot inside the house, and I brought this cabinet with me to Home Depot when I picked out the paint colors to make sure the orange would complement it.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

After painting the bricks orange, I used a dry brush to apply Craft Smart Brick Red paint (which is what I usually use as a base coat for bricks). This involves dipping a stiff bristle paintbrush in paint, and then dabbing most of the paint off on a paper towel before dabbing it on the bricks.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I then repeated that process with black, brown, wine red, and finally the orange again because I thought I’d covered up too much of it.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

They’re grungier than the bricks in the inspiration photo, but I think it works. In hindsight, maybe I should have used the gray trim color rather than black. That’s something I can play with when I do the rest of the bricks. (And there will be plenty of them to play with!)<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Next I added a coat of matte varnish.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And when that was dry, I added grout.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

It’s a good thing I haven’t done anything inside yet, because crumbs of grout fell into the house (it was lying on its back).<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Next I sponged off the grout with a damp sponge brush.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And then I blotted it with a paper towel to remove more of the wet grout. (Rubbing can cause the egg carton layers to separate.)<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Here’s how it looked once the damp bricks and grout dried. I could have done a better job of digging some of the grout out of the cracks and pits in the egg carton material. This isn’t horrible, but I might be a little more sparing with the grout when I’m working on the house exterior. I do really like the color though.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In the lower right corner, the top layer of egg carton rubbed off a few bricks when I was wiping up the grout. I covered these spots with a little bit of orange and a little bit of black, again using the dry brush. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Then I added another coat of matte varnish. Maybe it’s my imagination, but this seems to bring out the paint colors that get muted during the grouting process. I like the color of these better than what I ended up with for the Victorianna’s bricks.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And here’s the finished foundation. Okay, so it took a while, but doesn’t it look good?! <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is my inspiration house for the Mansard Victorian. It’s the Emanuel Kahn mansion in Salt Lake City, Utah (more pictures here). I realize I’m setting myself up for a lot of tedious work with a brick exterior. When I did the Victorianna’s brick foundation, it took so long that I swore I would never […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[41,19,100],"class_list":["post-19678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dollhouses","tag-egg-carton-stone","tag-half-scale","tag-mansard-victorian","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19678"}],"version-history":[{"count":44,"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19678\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19724,"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19678\/revisions\/19724"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}